Elysium
by Elysium-fic
Summary: Rìona Cousland confronts the Blight armed with a noblewoman's ambition and a courtesan's approach to diplomacy.
1. Chapter One: The Visitor

Eternal love and gratitude to twist_shimmy, darkrose and scarylady for feedback and beta work.

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Duncan nodded to the guard in Highever colors at the steel-bound oaken door to the family quarters of Castle Cousland, and the guard saluted as he passed from the exterior corridor into what he had come to consider the inner sanctum of the Cousland clan.

Windowless stone walls covered in finely woven and embroidered tapestries surrounded him. Here the interior was lit only by torches and candles giving off a warm, inviting glow that evoked the feeling of night even at midday. Located in the center of the castle, the family quarters had been designed long ago to be protective against invading enemies. Only the single guarded door provided entry and exit to the rest of the wing. Even the bedchambers had no windows, save for narrow slits high on the walls that could be shuttered or opened to allow air to circulate if the weather was right. If the castle was breached and overrun, the guard could fall back to the family quarters to defend their lord and make their final stand.

At least, that was the intended purpose of the design. Teyrn Bryce Cousland had put the arrangements to far more creative use. With the guard stationed outside the entire wing, one could go from one bedchamber to another within the privacy of the family wing itself with no gossiping eyes to see who was sleeping in whose chamber. Only the most intimately trusted friends of the Cousland family stayed in the family wing. All other guests were quartered within the separate guest wing.

"The teyrn and teyrna should be with you shortly, Warden-Commander," William, the chamberlain who had escorted him to his room, informed him with perfect courtesy. The chamberlain set down his packs near the wardrobe and asked, "Shall I order a bath prepared for you, ser?"

"Yes, thank you," Duncan said, and William gave him a smile and a nod, bowing slightly as he excused himself.

The Warden-Commander of Ferelden had just begun unbuckling his baldric when a maid rapped on the door and entered bearing buckets of hot water. A squire accompanied her to help Duncan with the removal of his armor and Duncan was happy to leave the lad to his task. Though he was perfectly proficient at doing it himself and had been for years, it was pleasant to spare himself the awkward bending and twisting and working of ties and buckles with one hand. He had a squire at the Grey Warden compound in Denerim who normally helped him don and doff his armor, but when he traveled to Castle Cousland, he traveled alone, knowing his all his needs would be met by the Couslands and their capable staff of servants and retainers.

By now, he imagined his squire was somewhere on the northern edge of the Bannorn, traveling south with the new Grey Warden recruits. He had brought Daveth with him from Denerim to the tournament in the northern port city of Highever, where he had found and recruited the Redcliffe-born knight, Ser Jory. His intention had originally been to travel directly south to Ostagar with them to join the king's army, but when the invitation to stay at Castle Cousland for a few days in order to test another knight had reached him, he had decided to send Daveth and Jory on to Ostagar to wait with the royal army and the rest of the Wardens while Duncan took the opportunity to find another recruit. The Grey Wardens desperately needed to increase their numbers before the archdemon made his appearance, and any opportunity to find qualified candidates had to be taken.

If he was honest with himself, however, he would admit there were other inducements for visiting Castle Cousland. It had been far too long since his last visit, and with the looming Blight, Duncan felt his mortality all too well. He knew in his heart this would be his last trip to Highever, his last time in the company of his friends. He wanted to say goodbye, and find comfort in them while he still could.

When, he wondered, had Castle Cousland started to feel like home to him, despite the infrequency of his visits?

Once Duncan was stripped down to his linen under-shirt and breeches, the squire bowed out of the chamber. The chambermaid completed preparing his bath and left as well. Finally alone, Duncan stripped to his skin and sank into the steaming water, relaxing. He was on the verge of drifting off to sleep, weary with long days of travel, when another rap on his chamber door startled him to alertness. Placing his hand upon the hilt of the dagger he had laid upon the side of the basin, he called out permission to enter.

"Duncan!" Bryce Cousland's voice filled the chamber. "Welcome back, old friend!"

Duncan laid aside his dagger and clasped the teyrn's hand, receiving a pat on his damp shoulder before his host made himself comfortable, sitting on the foot of the bed. Bryce's lovely and gracious wife, Eleanor, followed him in and shut the door behind her.

"Welcome, Duncan," she said with an affectionate smile, and leaned over the basin to bestow a kiss upon his lips. Duncan's wet hand came up from the water to cup the back of her head and he returned the kiss with the passion of one who had been without companionship for far too long.

"Thank you, Bryce, Eleanor," Duncan replied when the teyrna pulled away with a final caress down the line of his jaw. She went to sit beside her husband, who with an eager smile began unlacing the vest-like bodice she wore. Duncan smiled and leaned back in the basin.

There were, indeed, other inducements to visit Castle Cousland.

No one outside the Cousland family knew that Duncan and Bryce had met as boys in the Free Marches and had spent their days in youthful experimentation, discovering pleasure together. Nor did anyone know that the teyrn had taken to wife a woman who once had worked as a whore in an Antivan brothel. To Duncan alone had his old friend and one-time lover confided that particular fact.

Years after he first met Bryce Cousland, Duncan's new position as a Grey Warden had brought him back to Ferelden and into contact with his friend once more, and it was then that Bryce had made Duncan his confidante, with Eleanor's approval. The teyrn was always discreet; any connection to his wife's past he had been carefully concealed and any knowledgeable parties paid well for their silence. Voluptuaries, both—Bryce by nature, and Eleanor by training—they found themselves frustrated by the fact that there were certain pleasures that were not deemed discreet enough to be shared even with their closest friends. It was to fulfill that role that they had chosen Duncan.

Why they had decided they could trust him, Duncan did not know. Perhaps they correctly surmised that his position as the new Warden-Commander of Ferelden had made him pragmatic and unwilling to form judgments. Regardless of their reasons, when it was made clear that his hosts desired that he should lie with Eleanor while Bryce watched, Duncan could find no reason to object. The teyrna was a lovely and passionate woman, and Duncan had pleasant memories of his time with Bryce in meadows and haylofts all those years ago. And if Bryce and Eleanor found in Duncan the one person in all of Ferelden in whom they could confide their truths, Duncan found in them the one sanctuary in all of Ferelden where he did not have to toe a very tight diplomatic line and could be himself.

However, even Duncan found himself surprised by the scheme they had concocted, once it was revealed to him. In the wake of the rebellion against the Orlesian occupation, the Couslands' preeminence had been under threat, most notably from the new Teyrn of Gwaren, the one-time freeholder Loghain Mac Tir. Neither Bryce nor Duncan was certain what had transpired to give Loghain such an enmity toward the Couslands. Still, as the only other teyrn in Ferelden—and also as a war hero and confidante of the late King Maric, not to mention father-in-law to the current king, Cailan—Loghain was a powerful voice in the Landsmeet. And he had determinedly set himself against anything Cousland proposed.

To combat this, Bryce and Eleanor had conceived a plan together to build an empire for their family based on Bryce's political acumen and Eleanor's charm and sensuality. What they could not achieve by shrewd negotiation, they would win by seduction, allowing Eleanor to form discreet relationships and liaisons with carefully selected individuals and thus engendering goodwill that would pave the way for valuable votes within the Landsmeet, profitable trade contracts, land concessions, and much more.

It had proven a wildly successful endeavor, and by the time Duncan had come to Highever, the Cousland name was flying higher than ever before.

"It's been too long since you've been to visit us," Eleanor chided, bringing Duncan back to the present. She batted Bryce's hands away after he'd parted the satin kirtle she wore beneath her outer bodice far enough to display a generous hint of cleavage.

"I apologize, Lady Eleanor," Duncan said, forcing himself to continue to bathe casually, as though he were not as eager as Bryce himself for the welcome the teyrn and his lady had in store for him. "These last three years have been busy. With the Blight looming, I've been traveling a good deal more than I used to, seeking recruits; from Dragon's Peak, the West Hills, Redcliffe... I'd even travel to Gwaren if I thought I would be welcome by Teyrn Loghain's people. A little over a year ago I was even in Orlais for a conference of the Warden-Commanders of Thedas. I'm rarely in Denerim for long these days, or anywhere else for that matter."

"We were thrilled to find you were in Highever for the tournament," Bryce remarked. "I'm glad we could induce you come stay with us. I only wish I could be here for longer, but unfortunately I'm due to leave tonight for Ostagar myself, as soon as Rendon Howe gets here. The king has ordered us to gather our forces here and march directly south. I don't know how he's managed to take so long to muster his troops and get them from Amaranthine to Highever, but he's done it. Among his many other shortcomings, Howe leaves a great deal to be desired in the administration of his arling."

As always, Eleanor grimaced at the mention of Howe's name. Aware as he was of some of the events which had transpired to make the teyrna loathe the man so, Duncan was not surprised it took nothing short of the king mobilizing the northern armies for war to force Eleanor to permit the man in her castle again.

He nodded. "The king had mentioned he intended to summon you to bring Highever's troops to Ostagar."

Eleanor gave a fretful frown. "Well, hopefully with the both of you there you'll manage to look after one another."

Duncan tried not to let himself frown as well. It disturbed him more than he liked to know that Bryce and Fergus Cousland would both be there at Ostagar. The king was being negligent in refusing to summon more troops and it was far too likely Highever's men would pay the price. The size of the darkspawn horde was immense, and if the archdemon should appear...

Duncan shook himself, dispelling the thought. He would not think about that here, in the refuge that Castle Cousland had become for him over the decades. In this, his final visit, he would have peace.

"How fares the rest of your family?" he asked instead.

"Fergus and Oriana are well and will be eager to see you, I'm certain," Bryce answered. "Their son Oren is growing into a fine young lad. As for Rìona, well... You'll have to see my pup to believe it, Duncan. She's not the gangly girl she was last time you visited."

The warmth in Bryce's voice made Duncan look away awkwardly. If there was one aspect of his friendship with the Couslands that left him feeling ambivalent, it was the fact that they had decided to bring their children up with the same approach to diplomacy they themselves had employed to such great success. Upon reaching puberty, Fergus and Rìona had begun their tutelage in the same courtesan's training their mother had once received in Antiva.

In Antiva, however, such training was usually only overseen by the parents and conducted by retired courtesans and hired surrogates for the practice of more hands-on skills. The Couslands, unable to trust anyone to act as tutors and surrogates without actually sending to Antiva to hire them—which would have been foolish and indiscreet, given how assiduously they had worked to erase any connection Eleanor had to her past—had elected to train their children themselves.

Duncan had been stunned to discover this. Bryce had had the grace to look somewhat sheepish, but had shrugged and explained, "We cannot trust the discretion of anyone we might hire here. Fereldan sensibilities are too modest and the gossip would be ruinous. It is not necessarily a course either Eleanor or I would desire, and we've made it clear to our children that if they do not wish to learn, they are not required to do so and may stop at any time. However, there are dangerous and destabilizing forces at work within the Landsmeet, and if they have their way with Ferelden's future, it will be a disaster. It's important that our children to have every weapon at their disposal when their time comes to carry on the Cousland name, and so we teach them this just as we teach them diplomacy or skills at arms."

His duty as a Grey Warden called upon him to be far too pragmatic at times, and he had long since given over any pretensions of morality or idealism, and so Duncan resisted any impulse to judge his friend. Bryce Cousland liked to say that once enough taboos had been broken, the rest seemed ridiculously arbitrary, and Duncan couldn't find any reason to disagree. Perhaps he had seen too much, or perhaps his old friend's decadent sensibilities were beginning to rub off on him.

"Will she be wed soon?" Duncan asked politely, not willing to give Bryce an opportunity to wax rhapsodic with details about his daughter that Duncan would prefer not to be aware the father knew.

Bryce's laughter at the question was far too eager and made Duncan look at him curiously as he rose from the tub and reached for a linen drying cloth. "We're all hoping she will," Bryce answered.

Eleanor was far more forthcoming. "Rìona has her eye set on the throne," she explained.

Duncan lowered the cloth to peer askance at her. "What about Queen Anora?"

"Childless," Bryce said casually, "even after more than five years of marriage. It's common knowledge about court that Cailan is a lusty husband and has done his best to beget an heir, but so far with no success. Just over two years ago, right before Rìona turned sixteen, talk began to circulate that Cailan would soon find it necessary to have his marriage to Anora annulled and seek out another bride. Though she was approaching the age when we would have allowed her take a lover if she had chosen, Rìona instead elected to preserve her virginity and await the right time to make a play for the king. Now that Anora is approaching thirty, the moment seemed ripe. We were in the process of making plans to take Rìona to court and present her when news of the Blight arrived and we were commanded to marshal Highever's forces and march to Ostagar."

Bryce drew a deep breath and said, as though bewildered, "Personally, I thought this business was all behind me when I turned down the crown in favor of Maric, but this is Rìona's wish and it's a sound plan, all told. I continue to hold true to my loyalty to the Theirin dynasty, but King Cailan has not the broad support and popularity his father had. Uniting the Cousland and Theirin lines can only strengthen the monarchy. Certainly it could help offset Loghain's influence in the Landsmeet. I swear the man gets more insular and paranoid with each passing year. Safeguarding against invasion is all well and good—I am no more eager to be a vassal of the Orlesians than he is—but his preferences would leave us without allies should we need them."

Eleanor rose and began toweling Duncan's hair dry; after so many years of playing out variations of this same scene in the company of his friends, Duncan made no effort to hide the effect her nearness was having. "Naturally it would be a feat to have a Cousland on the throne, though I wonder if it will truly make our daughter happy. She's a creature of passion, and this self-imposed chastity is wearying for her. The poor girl is so frustrated it's nearly impossible to be around her these days, and I do not think she will enjoy the degree of discretion with which she will need to conduct herself should she become queen."

"You worry too much, Eleanor," Bryce scolded. "Our pup knows her own mind."

"Does she?" Eleanor asked, arching an eyebrow at him. "The only reasons the courtesans of Antiva don't actually run the country is because they realize that the moment they do more than subtly manipulate those in power, they become perceived as a threat and their own power will be lessened. I wonder if our daughter hasn't taken this notion of using the sensual arts to advance the Cousland name and influence to a far too ambitious extreme."

Conversation was quickly dismissed, however, as Eleanor lowered her cloth and stroked her fingers lightly down the line of Duncan's spine, trailing them over the curve of his backside. She began pressing kisses across his scarred shoulder blades, her hand circling around the front of his hip as Bryce watched, blue eyes avid.

Duncan turned and took up the job the teyrn had left off, deftly unlacing his hostess's bodice and letting his hands cup her breasts through the finely-woven shift she wore beneath. She kissed him again, this time with far more passionate intent than her earlier kiss of greeting had contained. Sighing, Duncan forced himself to dismiss the thought that this would be his final time with her, in this place that had come to feel like a home to him, and guided Eleanor back to the bed.

It was quite some time later that he lay with Eleanor resting on his chest and Bryce sprawled out beside them. At some point the teyrn had opened his doublet and unlaced his breeches, but he hadn't participated as he sometimes did, and he didn't seem particularly interested in seeking his own pleasure. Such was often the case, and Bryce had explained long ago that the appeal was in watching Eleanor have her pleasure without any distractions. Now he lightly ran his fingers up and down his wife's back as she rested against Duncan, drawing a contented hum from the teyrna.

"How are matters with your Grey Wardens?" the teyrn asked when the rush of passion had cooled enough to allow for conversation.

Duncan frowned. "Tithes have been meager and our numbers are not nearly what I would prefer they be to face a Blight," he said. "I've been recruiting as actively as I can, even invoking the Right of Conscription more often than would be my wont under less dire circumstances, but qualified fighters are scarce and the welcome I receive in other parts of the realm is not nearly so warm as the one given me here in Highever."

"According to Lady Landra and some of my other correspondents, the gossip in Denerim is that this can't possibly be a real Blight," Eleanor remarked, lifting her head. "After four hundred years, no one seems to believe it can happen. The nobles aren't willing to invest all the time, effort and gold it takes to train up skilled men-at-arms only to have the best of them poached by the Grey Wardens to fight a threat no one really believes to be possible."

"Precisely, my lady," Duncan agreed. "Without divulging Grey Warden secrets, I cannot convince them that there is no question this Blight is real. Resentment has grown apace with the pressure I've exerted for greater tithes and more recruits."

"Perhaps what you need is a goodwill ambassador," Bryce suggested. "If you cannot convince them by more direct means, seduce them instead. Recruit a young woman with the charm and political savvy to bring them around to your way of thinking without the heavy-handed application of the Right of Conscription. You've seen how well such methods have worked for us over the years."

Duncan allowed himself a laugh, though it quickly occurred to him that the idea was not as absurd as it initially seemed. It would require suppressing his scruples enough to play the panderer, but then, in these desperate times his scruples were not what they might once have been. "I can hardly imagine where I would find such a recruit. If her primary role was not combative, I suppose I could settle for moderate, rather than stellar, fighting ability. But she would still need to be a skilled fighter on top of being possessed of these other abilities. I could comb every brothel in Ferelden for years before finding a qualified candidate, and I'm afraid I do not have years to spend on the endeavor. Unless you'd like to offer your daughter for recruitment?" he asked with an arch expression.

At the suggestion, Bryce looked considerably less sanguine, and Duncan admitted to himself it was good to see his easy-going friend discomposed for once. "I don't have so many children that I would gladly see them all off to war," the teyrn said, bristling. "Unless you intend to invoke the Right of Conscription—?"

"Have no fear, my friend," Duncan said, his tone conciliatory. He did not want what was likely to be his final visit to Highever to be filled with strife and resentment. "At tempting as recruitment might be, I am content to wait and test this Ser Gilmore you mentioned. But you can see my dilemma. Your suggestion has possibilities, but under the circumstances—"

Eleanor sat up abruptly, rising from the bed and gathering her clothing in stiff, jerky movements. "I personally don't think it a horrible idea to consider Rìona," she told them. "I think her chances of finding a purpose amongst the Grey Wardens are at least as high as the path she's presently put herself upon. I think she's being foolishly ambitious with this business of being queen, and I think you're being foolish to encourage her!"

"I'm entrusting her to look after the teyrnir," Bryce argued. "If she's qualified to do that, there's no reason she won't make an outstanding queen."

"It's not a matter of competence!" Eleanor retorted, smoothing her shift down over her hips and reaching for her kirtle. "I don't question her ability, merely her temperament. I think she's making a trap for herself, and you're baiting it!"

"Eleanor!" Bryce sounded surprised by his lady's sudden vehemence. He rose from the bed to cross to her, taking her by the shoulders. "Why have you not mentioned these misgivings before?"

"I don't know." The teyrna's shoulders slumped and she shook her head. "Perhaps I'm the one being foolish. I should be thrilled, after all. My daughter, the daughter of a common whore, rising to the Fereldan throne? It's scarcely to be believed!"

"You have never been common, love," Bryce said warmly, lifting her hand to kiss it a strangely courtly gesture, considering they were only partially dressed and in Duncan's bedchamber. Not for the first time, Duncan envied their easy affection with one another.

The teyrna rewarded her husband's gallantry with a halfhearted smile, lacing up her bodice. "I apologize, my lord. I think it's these preparations for going to war. I'm... uneasy with everything today, it seems. Ignore me. Lady Landra should be just about done sleeping off her hangover now. I will go check upon her and see to preparations for supper. Again, welcome back, Duncan," she said, bowing her head and leaving the chamber. Bryce frowned after her.

"She fears for me and Fergus," the teyrn said, staring at the closed door a long moment, his own shoulders falling. He did not turn to look at Duncan as he righted his own clothing. "Make yourself at home, my friend. In my absence, Rìona shall see to whatever you need while you are here testing Ser Gilmore. I will go see if Howe has managed to arrive yet, and meet you in the Great Hall to discuss preparations for the march to Ostagar."

"As you say, my lord," Duncan acknowledged.

"Duncan—" The teyrn looked at him at last, then shook his head, dismissing whatever he had been about to say. "Never mind. It's good to have you back, my friend."


	2. Chapter Two: Betrayals

Duncan went to the training grounds in the hopes of locating Ser Gilmore. Instead, he found his hosts' daughter. Standing silently in the shadow of a building, he watched her breath make frosty puffs of vapor in the frigid early-winter air. With Satinalia just behind them and First Day not far off, the weather had turned cold swiftly. All signs were pointing toward an early, long, and brutal winter. Far from ideal conditions for conducting a war this far south in Thedas.

He watched as she first practiced with her bow, taking aim at the painted targets propped upon bundles of straw. Her stance was easy, her shoulders and arms and back straight but relaxed, and her aim pleasingly accurate. For a short while, she worked on firing more rapidly, sacrificing accuracy for speed. Then she slowed down the rate at which she fired her arrows, concentrating on landing them dead center in the target. A few she aimed at a small circle drawn at the base of a nearby strawman, and it took Duncan a moment to realize she was practicing immobilizing her opponent by piercing their foot with an arrow so as to lame them or pin them to the ground. A useful trick for allowing an archer to gain a safer distance from which to continue firing.

At length, she laid aside her bow and took up her daggers, a sturdy and unremarkable pair of iron blades that looked like they had seen a good deal of use. Clearly she was not so pampered that she insisted upon a pair of shining, custom-made daggers balanced specifically for her hands.

It created a puzzling contrast to the rest of her armor. The craftsmanship of her bow and her armor itself were much finer and more ornate. Duncan suspected it was intended for ceremonial appearance, though it was still functional. Not surprising: Fereldan freeholders followed nobles who were capable of leading them in times of war, giving rise to a strong martial tradition amongst Fereldan nobility. Even as queen she would be expected to look capable of leading troops if necessity called for it.

The wood of her bow gleamed, highly polished and painted with accents in gold and Cousland blue. Though she used plain arrows for her practice, propped nearby was an ornate, gold-trimmed quiver full of arrows fletched with feathers dyed blue at the edges. That same shade of blue was dyed into her leather armor as well, and at each shoulder, her pauldrons were embossed with the Cousland laurel-wreath device in gold.

Why, Duncan wondered, had such care been taken to arm her befitting her skill and station, but neglect her daggers?

It was not long before he discovered the reason for the disparity.

Her attacks on the strawman were lackluster at best. It was evident that she had been trained in the rudiments of close-quarters combat, but never in the finer points. Her forms were primarily defensive, which meant the initiative would always be with her foe, the aggressor. Duncan found himself strangely disappointed by the realization; he'd wanted her to be a better fighter.

He reminded himself that it didn't matter whether or not he would recruit her. Bryce Cousland's off-the-cuff remark should not be taken so seriously, and yet Duncan could not dismiss the thought. Had he the time, he would send to the Warden-Commander of Antiva and tell him to seek a recruit amongst the courtesans. But Antivan women of that rank were not trained to fight. Even if they were, an Antivan Warden would not garner the same trust from the Fereldan nobility; no, if he were going to seek out a "goodwill ambassador" she would need to be a Fereldan lass.

But she could not be the girl he was presently watching so surreptitiously. So why was he standing there silently willing her to demonstrate stronger skills than he had seen so far? He had given his word, and moreover, the girl wasn't really suitable. Her lack of skill with her daggers didn't actually trouble him nearly as much as the blue-dyed leather of her armor and the laurel-wreath device on her pauldrons.

Tradition was that Grey Wardens left their family names and identities behind when they joining the order. Any history, no matter how shameful or vaunted, was abandoned. If one had the skill to be a Grey Warden, that was all that mattered. Criminals, whores and blood mages were as welcome as knights and lordlings.

But Rìona Cousland had an identity and a purpose Duncan perceived she would be loathe to abandon. She would always think of herself as a Cousland first and everything else would be secondary.

She was not suitable, he insisted to himself. And yet he could not stop thinking about recruiting her. He'd done more despicable things in his life than break his word to a life-long friend, after all.

He was about to announce his presence and inquire after the whereabouts of Ser Gilmore when a red-haired young man approached from the far end of the training grounds. Immediately upon spying him, a smile replaced the frown of concentration the young lady Cousland had been wearing, a sort of fleeting, unguarded smile that she quickly suppressed.

Duncan felt his eyebrows lift in surprise. Bryce and Eleanor had not mentioned the girl had a sweetheart.

"I've been looking for you," the lad in armor bearing the Cousland device said, loping eagerly toward her.

"Good afternoon, Ser Gilmore," the teyrn's daughter greeted him warmly, setting her daggers aside and placing a hand on his armored chest. Hearing the name, Duncan listened more closely. This was the lad Teyrn Cousland wanted him to recruit? Did Bryce fear the young knight would meddle with his daughter? "Have you come to spar with me? You know I need the practice."

"Good afternoon, my lady." The knight took her hand and pressed a passionate kiss on the knuckles where her fingerless leather gauntlets ended. "Your mother sent me to find you. Your hound has found his way into the larder again and has everyone in an uproar. Nan is threatening to quit again."

Lady Rìona rolled her eyes. "Nan has been threatening to quit three times a week since I left her care in the nursery. I highly doubt she'll find the determination to do it at this late date."

"Be that as it may, I'm under strict orders from your mother to accompany you to the kitchens and deal with the problem."

"Surely you don't need _me_ for that," she said, offering him a pretty dimple that somehow rang false. Duncan's brow furrowed as he watched; why was she eager to get rid of her sweetheart, after that instant of joy she'd evidenced upon seeing him? She ran a finger down his smooth cheek and Duncan forced himself not to rub his own grizzled beard. The lad was barely old enough for facial hair.

"I'm likely to get my arm bitten off if I attempt it without you," the knight replied, his voice deepening. "I far too attached to my hands to take the risk."

"Oh, Conall won't bite," the girl vowed, lifting one of the knight's hands in both of hers, "though I must say, these are lovely hands." Teasingly, she nibbled the knuckle of one of his fingers and Ser Gilmore let out a low moan.

"My lady!" he gasped when she took a fingertip between her lips and sucked on it. "My sweet Rìona, I swear I'm going to go mad if I can't have you soon!"

"You know why we can't, my knight," Lady Rìona murmured, letting herself be guided backwards until she was backed against one of the haystacks behind the targets. Duncan found himself witness to a kiss that seemed, to his eyes, far too personal for him to want to witness it. "As a bann's son and a knight in your own right, you're in an excellent position to make an advantageous marriage, but it cannot be with me."

"And why not?" the lad asked ardently, sliding his lips along her neck. Lady Rìona made a desperate sound.

"Because marriage is not a matter of passion or romance. We have duties to our families that cannot be ignored. And I would not subject you to a lifetime of catty arls' wives sliding sweetly-worded daggers between your ribs, insinuating with false praise that you married too high above your station. Besides, my intentions are unchanged. I'll be off to Denerim once the Blight has been dealt with; it is what is best for my family and, I think, for Ferelden. I promise to send for you, once I've met my goal. Once my plans are set into motion, once I've secured the Couslands' place as the preeminent family in all of Ferelden, then we can have each other."

Duncan looked away, feeling much the unwilling voyeur, as the knight pressed her into a more passionate kiss and Lady Rìona returned the embrace, allowing Gilmore to slide his hand down the curve of her breast while his other hand crept up her thigh to beneath the leather strips of her war skirt. She moved in a sinuous motion and gasped softly, then pushed the knight's hand away.

"Careful, dear knight," she said. "We mustn't take any unnecessary risks. Please. Go tend to the situation with my mabari. Certainly you carry my scent strongly enough now he will follow your commands with no question at all. I... need a moment to compose myself."

"I will, my lady!" the young knight swore, bestowing upon her one last hard, eager kiss, before racing off in the direction of the kitchens.

Lady Rìona watched until he had rounded a corner, and then straightened, pulling her shoulders back. When she turned her eyes toward Duncan, she was _entirely_ composed.

An act. It had all been an act. Or... had it been sincere and her composure the lie?

Duncan didn't know if he was impressed at how easily the girl had manipulated her knight into doing her bidding or appalled at her flawless dissemblance.

"Do you enjoy _watching_, Warden-Commander?" she asked, clearly having been aware of his presence all along. "I would have thought you a man of action, instead."

"I enjoy watching when the show is worth seeing," Duncan answered casually. "Well played, my lady. That poor lad has no idea what hit him."

"Are you implying I'm leading him on? For shame, ser!" she scolded, turning her back to collect her daggers and bow. "Clearly you know nothing about me."

"Are you saying you genuinely intend to keep the knight on as your paramour once you've married the king?" Duncan asked skeptically, falling into step beside her as she left the training grounds. After the scene he had just witnessed, it didn't occur to him to question whether or not she would meet her aims. He now suspected that Rìona Cousland having her way was as inevitable as the tides.

The teyrn's words came back to haunt Duncan again. What could that sort of single-minded determination, coupled with her political awareness, accomplish on behalf of the Grey Wardens?

"When I give my word, ser, it is golden," Lady Rìona said firmly. "The day shall come when Ser Gilmore may have me, if he so desires. Of course, I cannot be held accountable for the vagaries of fate. If, between now and then, he decides his destiny lies elsewhere—for instance, among the Grey Wardens—I will not stand in his way."

"You were behind your father's suggestion that I come here and test the knight for recruitment." The words were out before Duncan realized he even intended to speak, and Lady Rìona's eyes widened in amazement.

"Well spotted, Warden-Commander!" She smiled in sincere admiration. "I hadn't given you credit as a subtle thinker, but clearly I was mistaken. I didn't think my hand in the matter would be so easy to discern. I really must work on that."

"Had I not been witness to that little display, I might not have put it together," Duncan shrugged. "Though I find I must ask, why?"

"He jeopardizes my plans," Lady Rìona answered. "Despite what you may have surmised from 'that little display' my attraction to Ser Gilmore is all too genuine. I find myself in a very precarious position."

Duncan stopped when she did, outside the armory. He followed her within its dusty, twilit confines where she set her daggers and bow on a weapons rack and began removing her couters and vambraces, gloves and pauldrons. When she began to pull at the buckles of her leather cuirass, however, Duncan shifted uncomfortably and turned his eyes aside.

"Bashful?" Duncan gritted his teeth in annoyance at the amusement in her voice. "That's just a bit absurd, don't you think? I am, after all, the only member of my family you haven't slept with."

"Your pardon, my lady, but you _were_ fourteen the last time I visited." Unable to endure her ridicule, Duncan made himself stop looking away.

"Is that what troubles you? Or the fact that you just came from my mother's bed?"

Duncan swore to himself. He would not be embarrassed, certainly not before this chit's impertinent ribbing.

"Speaking of your mother, won't she be put out that you sent Ser Gilmore to perform the task she assigned to you?" he asked, seeking to change the subject.

"Oh, undoubtedly," Lady Rìona said blithely, removing her cuirass to reveal the sweat dampened linen shirt she wore underneath. "She sent Rory to tempt me. She thinks my personality isn't suited to being queen."

"Which brings us once again back to the fact that you're trying to send Ser Gilmore away. You still haven't actually explained why."

The young noblewoman breathed a sigh, unlacing the leather loin covering she wore over her smallclothes and pulling on a pair of loose linen breeches once it had been removed. As she pulled the drawstring that tightened the waist, she looked up at him.

"Do you know why my father cultivated you as a confidante, Duncan?"

"I—no. I confess I've always wondered that myself."

"It's a wearying art we Couslands practice," she observed, her expression pensive as she led the way back out of the armory, stopping only to inform a squire that her armor and weapons were to be cleaned and polished and delivered to her bedchamber. "Our passion and pleasure are genuine, for that is the training we have received, but we are forever feigning modesty, interest, affection. Father wished to assure that there would be at least one person with whom we would never need to dissemble."

"And you're weary of dissembling for Ser Gilmore?"

"I dislike misleading others, and it's very hard to feign affection for a prolonged period of time without actually beginning to feel affection," she explained. "I started my flirtation with Rory when I was a mere girl, to test my wiles. Now I'm eighteen and well primed to fall in love. I find myself in danger of losing my heart... among other things. I could have taken a lover years ago, and the burden of chastity has begun to chafe until I can no longer tell desire from affection. I'd much rather be done with the matter than continue to suffer these tedious childish games to which I've restricted myself thus far."

As easily as that, Duncan found himself moving from consternation at the girl's tactics to pity for her plight. It had never before occurred to him to approve or disapprove of Bryce Cousland's scheme for his family, but seeing the trap he had led his daughter to create for herself, for the first time he questioned his friend's wisdom. "There is always your mother's solution," he heard himself suggesting.

"Give over my objectives and take Rory to my bed?" She shook her head dismissively. "No, the game's too far gone for that. I've been sheltered from society for years in preparation for my assault upon the king's defenses. Only a careful management of the gossip has prevented the court from assuming I'm feeble or mad. If I take a mere knight as lover, or Maker forbid, husband, next thing you know rumor will have it that Mother and Father had to pawn me off on some unsuspecting dupe and that congenital idiocy runs rampant in the Cousland line. Better to end the matter entirely." Lady Rìona smiled brightly at him, and there was something brittle to it. "Now, _you_, on the other hand... hmm, yes. That might almost be worth it. Alas, I dare not invite you to play these even childish teasing games. It would be all too easy to forget myself and yield everything in the pleasure of the moment."

"I hardly think that would be appropriate, in any event."

"Whyever not?" she demanded. "My mother would thank you for relieving me of the burden of virginity without unnecessarily engaging my affections. Besides, I'm older now than my brother was when you bedded him."

"Is there anything you Couslands don't discuss amongst yourselves?" Duncan asked with a wry shake of his head.

She pretended to ponder the question for a moment, pursing her lips prettily. "No. Not at all."

Uncertain how to respond, Duncan said nothing. Despite his long-denied lusts having been so recently and well sated by the teyrna, the subject was far more intriguing than it should have been. The decadence and licentiousness of the Couslands' practices was infectious, and he was all too aware of the fact that his opportunities to sample such pleasures would soon be ending forever.

As they walked back to the family quarters, Lady Rìona remarked conversationally, "I understand that Cailan is a great admirer of the Grey Wardens."

"_King_ Cailan has been most generous with us and is eager to defeat the Blight," he answered diplomatically.

"I imagine, then, when the Blight is over, there will be plenty of opportunity for me to invite you to the palace."

His body responding far too intensely to the sizzling promise in her eyes as she gave him a significant look, Duncan wasn't certain that he was regretful, or relieved, that he'd never have the opportunity to receive such an invitation.

* * *

Twelve hours later, there was no sizzle in Rìona Cousland's eyes.

Howe's men, it turned out, were not so mysteriously delayed. Instead, they had waited until Fergus Cousland had departed to lead Highever's troops to Ostagar, leaving the castle all but unguarded, and attacked.

It took him some time to locate her; he'd gone seeking her and her mother at the teyrn's behest, but when he'd made his way to the family wing, all that remained in her bedchamber was the naked corpse of the elven woman Rìona had flirted with all through supper, and two men wearing the bear device of Amaranthine who each had her blue-fletched arrows piercing them.

Duncan finally found her in the larder, kneeling over her dying father.

The desolation on the face of the teyrn's daughter was almost frightening, so bleak was her grief and fury at such treachery.

"Duncan!" Bryce gasped, a fleck of blood appearing on his lips. "You must take my wife and daughter with you, away from here. You must help them reach the king."

"I will, my friend, but I fear I must ask something in return..." He felt sick at himself as he heard the words falling from his lips, knowing that what he was saying was a betrayal of all the friendship and affection and trust the teyrn and his family had given him over the years. And yet he did it anyway, exploiting the opportunity of this tragedy in this place he'd come to think of as a home in order to benefit the Grey Wardens. "I came here seeking a recruit. The Blight demands I leave with one."

He felt even worse when Bryce Cousland's eyes went to his daughter, kneeling there with tears streaking her cheeks. The teyrn realized what Duncan was proposing, knew Duncan was thinking of their conversation that morning, of the Grey Warden's need for a "goodwill ambassador." Bryce knew that when Duncan spoke of recruiting Rìona, he was speaking of recruiting her not for her ability as a fighter, but for her skills at diplomacy and seduction. He was asking Bryce to let him play the panderer for Bryce's daughter.

It was a revolting thought. Of all the deplorable things he'd done over the years in the interest of the Grey Wardens, this was by far the worst. And yet the teyrn agreed to the plan. Duncan would never know whether Bryce Cousland recognized the dire need driving Duncan's actions in that moment, or if the dying teyrn simply felt that there was no other choice.

Either way, Duncan wished he could apologize. He wished he could beg his friend's forgiveness for this betrayal.

"No!" Lady Rìona said in disbelief, grasping their meaning. "I can't be a Grey Warden! I must find Fergus. I must seek vengeance on Howe for what he has done here this night!"

Duncan listened as his old friend spoke to his daughter solemnly about the call of duty over vengeance, about the threat of the Blight and the honor of being chosen to be a Grey Warden. If the girl was unwilling, recruiting her would be pointless as well as despicable; how could he expect her to go forth and seduce allies to the side of the Grey Wardens if she loathed everything they stood for?

Lady Rìona attended her father's words, and when he had ceased speaking, she asked simply, "And what of the king?"

"You must put that behind you now, pup," the teyrn said, and once again Duncan found himself speaking without ever intending to do so.

"Not necessarily," he said, his thoughts turning wildly to think of how he could gain Lady Rìona's willing cooperation and still meet his aims. In the process, he seized upon a hope that was both brilliant and mad.

If the girl was to be his goodwill ambassador, why not start at the very top?

"I will give you as much time as I am able to attempt to win the king, if that is what it will take to convince you not to force me to invoke the Right of Conscription, for I would much rather have you as a willing recruit," he said, facing the teyrn's daughter. "You heard correctly when you heard that King Cailan is an admirer of the Grey Wardens. He admires us too much, in fact. It is making him reckless. He thinks so long as we are at his side, he cannot fail, even if he charges into battle with insufficient forces. He refuses to wait for reinforcements from Redcliffe and other parts of the kingdom, and... some of his advisers are attempting to convince him that we do not need help from the Orlesians. Grey Wardens are supposed to remain politically neutral, but that is no longer an option. If we cannot convince the king, Ferelden will fall. Perhaps you can persuade him to set aside his desire for glory, where I have failed."

Rìona drew a deep breath, considering his compromise. "If that's to be the case, then my virginity is now the only coin I have. I need your word of honor, now, here before my father, that I will arrive at Ostagar a maiden."

Had circumstances been less dire, Duncan might have been affronted. But he remembered her words that afternoon, and wondered if she wasn't more concerned about her own lack of control than his.

"You have my word."

"There, pup, you see?" The teyrn's attempt at encouragement fell flat as he was seized by a fit of coughing, flecks of blood rising to his lips. "Do your duty, daughter. Make us proud," he whispered, an alarming gurgle in his voice.

Weeping, Rìona consented. There was more debate when the teyrna announced her intention to stay behind and guard their retreat, but in the end, she kissed her mother and father goodbye. If the kiss was somewhat more intimate than he might expect between a daughter and her parents, he could no longer find it within himself to be troubled by it, not after the course he had set himself upon. With her father's blood upon her lips, the young woman followed behind him, her mabari at her side, as they made their escape. The sounds of combat and the screams of innocents being slaughtered followed them as they fled the castle into the night.

They did not make camp until the sun set the following evening and by then they were both staggering and half-asleep with weariness. He turned from his recruit to set his weapons upon the ground. Rìona had been silent and stoic throughout the day, and Duncan could not find it within him to disrupt her mourning. Thus he was startled when suddenly she was there, pulling him about by the shoulders to face her. He caught a glimpse of the leather loin covering and the smallclothes she wore beneath her armor discarded on the ground, and then she was pushing at him.

"I must remain a virgin," were the only words she spoke, her tone grim and hollow, as Duncan allowed himself to be shoved to the ground, his hands settling on her thighs as she straddled his face. He wondered if this, too, was a betrayal, or if it was perhaps the only true way for them to mourn together the loss of her family, all of whom had at one time been his friends and lovers. And even now, even surrounded by the scent of her musk and the taste of her essence, he could hear the roar of the archdemon in his mind, its call singing in his blood, beckoning Duncan to his death, making of him a desperate man who no longer cared whom he betrayed.

His tongue prodded gently, retreating when he encountered the barrier of her maidenhead, and he instead focused on the task of pleasuring her. It was not long before a sound reached his ears.

It was not passion.

Heaving with sobs, she ground against him and then slid off to the side, keening with anguish as she curled upon the ground. Her tears made the blood on her lips dissolve into trails down her chin as she cried herself to sleep.


	3. Chapter Three: Gambits

Five days, Rìona thought, meeting the king's eyes as she rose from her courteous bow.

Five days, the scouts were reporting, until retreat would be impossible and the army assembled at Ostagar would be forced into battle with the approaching darkspawn horde. Five days for Rìona, who had never before seen battle, to convince Cailan to disregard the advice of his other councilors and encourage him to heed Duncan's recommendation that he order the army to fall back and wait for reinforcements from Orlais.

_"Five days isn't much time to win that sort of trust, much less secure an offer of marriage,"_ she'd remarked to Duncan when he told her how much time she had. They regarded each other cautiously, for their journey from Highever had been long and difficult, fraught with desperation. At times she thought she might be going mad, her moods wildly vacillating between soul-rending grief and anger, her thoughts disoriented and adrift in uncertainty. Her goal of honoring her father's final request and ensnaring Cailan was the only thing that kept her moving forward, for not only was it familiar, a link to her life before, but it was a concrete thing, as well; an achievable end in a world suddenly that was suddenly vague and lacking in boundaries.

It also seemed to be something she no longer actually cared about. She continued moving toward it because it was all she had, and yet she did so by rote, not even knowing why it had once seemed so important to her. Nothing seemed to matter anymore. It was her duty, to her family and to the Grey Wardens, and her father had bade her do her duty. But all she wanted was to care about something again.

Duncan looked annoyed for a moment when she mentioned marrying the king. He, too, had his unpredictable moods. His pragmatic notion of sending her to charm the king in order to aid his cause was at odds with a sense of ethical repugnance against employing such schemes. It made their journey together tense, rife with a powerful sexual awareness that could not have its natural conclusion. She pleasured herself with him to feel connected to her family again, because to touch and be touched was familiar and comforting to her, and Duncan reciprocated, driven by some dark desperation of his own that he would not speak of.

They used each other, so far as they were able to do so without compromising her virginity, by night, and circled warily around each other during the day. By the time they were a day away from Ostagar, they were both on tenterhooks, as likely to tear at each other in rage as in passion.

_"Understand this,"_ Duncan had answered firmly. _"My primary purpose in giving you space to pursue King Cailan is to sway him to toward heeding our advice and waiting for reinforcements. The rest of it is your concern. My concern is in convincing him to fall back until the Grey Wardens from Orlais arrive."_

_"Are you saying I am... forbidden to accept an offer of marriage, should the king make one?"_ she'd queried, suddenly afraid he would go back on the promise he had made her father.

_"There are no rules forbidding Grey Wardens from marrying."_ Duncan had looked away from her, his eyes distant for a moment. _"But there _are_ rules from Weisshaupt requiring Grey Wardens to remain politically neutral, particularly in Ferelden. It's ironic, considering the political situation in the Anderfels, but the First Warden fears a repeat of the expulsion of Grey Wardens from Ferelden. But the First Warden did not count on the next Blight beginning in the one nation in Thedas where the Grey Warden presence is smallest, and the Grey Wardens themselves are the least trusted. Political neutrality is no longer an option, whatever it may cost us in the end."_

"That doesn't answer my question."

He shook his head. _"You are not forbidden to marry. But have you considered there is just as much power to be wielded from behind the throne as upon it?"_

_"Meaning I ought to attempt to become the king's mistress, instead?"_ Rìona asked incredulously. _"Nonsense. If I were some minor bann's daughter, or perhaps even an arl's, then it might be possible. But the daughter of the Teyrn of Highever must make a high marriage or the whole kingdom will want to know why. If I'm seen keeping company with the king for years without being wed, every member of the nobility will know I'm leading him around by the prick and they'll do their level best to topple me. Without the bonds of marriage, it will be much easier for them to succeed. All it could accomplish would be to darken the Cousland name and win me a short window of limited influence."_

_"As you wish,"_ Duncan replied. _"You know your art best. I would caution you, however, that being a Grey Warden and the queen will have its own set of difficulties."_

Very well then, she thought, bringing her attention back to the lovely, golden-haired man before her. Five days. She affected a nervous, trembling smile for the king's benefit, dropping her eyes as though in modesty, or awe.

More dissembling. Strange how her distaste for it seemed to have grown since her flight from Highever.

"Allow me to introduce you, Your Majesty—" Duncan began, but Cailan cut him off.

"No need, Duncan!" The king said with an affable smile. "You are Bryce's youngest, are you not? I don't think we've _actually_ met."

Rìona allowed herself to meet his gaze, and there in that slight widening of his eyes, that expectant gleam, she found her clue on how to proceed with him.

Her idea to wed Cailan had been hatched shortly before she turned sixteen, at which time she normally would have been introduced to the king and joined the court whenever she was in Denerim. Once her parents had agreed to the plan to attempt to ensnare Cailan, however, that had changed. The king had only been married to Anora Mac Tir for two years at that point, long enough to start the gossips chattering about the fact that she hadn't yet conceived an heir, but not long enough for political pressure over the matter to mount.

For the best chances of success, the Couslands had decided to bide their time until a few more years had passed. At worst, in that time Anora would conceive an heir and their plan would have to be abandoned. At best, it meant that by the time they introduced Rìona to him, Cailan would be under considerable pressure to annul his marriage to the queen and choose a new bride.

Rìona kept away from court, more by her own choice than by the edict of her parents. She engaged in social events in Denerim only enough to forestall any rumors that her parents might be keeping her away from society because she was mad or sickly. When gossip instead began carrying the tale that she was being cloistered due to an impending marriage contract with some wealthy Orlesian or Antivan prince instead, they did nothing to stop it.

She specifically avoided events that the king would be attending whenever possible. To him, she doled out stingy glimpses of herself as a miser parts with coin. If he attended a supper at the Cousland manor in Denerim in his honor, she made certain to be seated at the far end of the table from him. She yielded nothing but a modest curtsy with her head shyly bowed if they should pass each other in the palace, always making certain that she was in the company of someone in front of whom the king could not press her into a more forward display.

Enough to intrigue him, but nothing more. But until that moment when he halted Duncan's offer of introduction, Rìona had no way of knowing whether or not the king had been paying attention.

Clearly, he had.

"Yes, Your Majesty," she answered with another bow. "My name is Rìona, and I bring dire news from Highever."

It was not necessary to dissemble or affect distress as she and Duncan laid out for the king what had happened at Highever, though there was no time to go into detail beyond her parents' death and Rendon Howe's betrayal.

Cailan's reaction was gratifying, for he seemed genuinely aggrieved and incensed, and he vowed that once the darkspawn threat was eradicated, he would turn his attention to retaking Highever for the Couslands. She felt tears burn her eyes and made no effort to hide them. He smiled, pleased to have offered her some comfort, and Rìona let her eyes drop again, as though nervous or reluctant to be caught staring too openly.

"Howe will hang," Cailan promised her. "I know it won't bring your parents back, but it's the least I can offer the daughter of one of my most loyal subjects."

"Thank you, Your Majesty, for your words of comfort and your promise of justice," she murmured. "I beg you, though, give me leave to seek my brother and tell him what has happened."

"Unfortunately, Lady Cousland, I cannot," Cailan said regretfully. "I am certain you desire the comfort of your remaining family at this time, but your brother is with some of his troops scouting in the Wilds. He won't return until after the battle."

Rìona's heart sank, for more than anything in that moment she wanted her brother's arms. She wanted to share her grief with someone who understood her loss, but with whom she did not have the complex, tense relationship she and Duncan had developed. Despite having just spoken of her parents' death, it was the knowledge that she would not have the comfort of her brother than made her feel as though she could dissolve into tears completely.

Dejected and confused, she nodded. "I see. Thank you again, Your Majesty."

She glanced a Duncan for a moment and was surprised to see him looking stricken. Had he hoped to see Fergus as well, then? He'd bedded Fergus on occasion, perhaps he felt close enough to her brother to wish to bear the news of his family's deaths to him with Rìona. Whatever his reasons, Duncan quickly shuttered his expression, and she could no longer see what about the mention of her brother had troubled him.

"I'm anxious to learn more about what happened at Highever," the king said after a moment. "Duncan, it had been my intention to invite you to supper in my tent so that you could give me more information, but I imagine you have affairs you need to attend to with your Grey Wardens."

"I am at your disposal, of course, Your Majesty," Duncan said carefully.

"No, I wouldn't dream of keeping you from preparing your Wardens for battle. But... perhaps if you can spare Lady Cousland, she might relate to me all that happened. If, of course, you would not find it too painful to speak of, Lady Cousland," he amended courteously.

She could feel Duncan's grave eyes upon her, boring into her even as he grew still and cautiously noncommittal.

"I can spare my recruit for the evening if you wish, Your Majesty," he finally said with a bow.

Strange, Rìona mused, that any feeling of triumph should be absent. Maker's blood, why had she been hoping Duncan would find an excuse to refuse her permission to join Cailan? Why was she suddenly so reluctant to play this game with the king, when she'd been training for it, awaiting her opportunity, for years?

_Do your duty, daughter. Make us proud._

"I would be honored to sup with you, Your Majesty," Rìona forced herself to say with a polite incline of her head. Recalling her mother's lessons on how to use words to titillate, she deliberately lingered on the word "sup." Her voice dropped ever so slightly, and she let her tongue draw out the sibilance of the first letter, making it subtly suggestive. Cailan's eyes widened slightly in response, and she knew she had his interest.

"Until tonight then," the king said, shaking himself and walking away with his guards following him. Rìona let her eyes follow him, until that glinting golden armor had faded in the distance.

Unwilling to tackle the complex dynamic that had sprung up between Duncan and herself, she sought a neutral topic. "The king doesn't seem to take the darkspawn threat very seriously," she observed, her tone cautious.

"They _have_ won several battles against the darkspawn here already, while we were en route."

"And yet you don't sound reassured."

"Those were mere skirmishes," Duncan said dismissively. "Make no mistake, we're outnumbered. The horde grows vaster ever day as more and more darkspawn pour out of the Deep Roads. I _know_ there is an archdemon behind this, but so far it has not shown itself, and without that proof, King Cailan will not be convinced how dire the situation truly is."

"Will the Grey Wardens from Orlais make that much difference?" she asked.

"No, but the legions of chevaliers the Empress has offered to send with them would. Unfortunately, _that_ is a politically sensitive topic." A tired sigh gave Duncan's opinion on the matter. "Not everyone has been as willing as your father to put the Orlesian occupation in the past and seek cooperation with Orlais. Between his own belief that having Grey Wardens beside him makes him invulnerable, and the insistence of his advisers that we do not require Orlesian troops, we're looking at a battle against overwhelming odds. I have done all I can to convince him to fall back and await reinforcements. Now it is up to you."

"I understand my duty," Rìona said tightly.

"Very well, then." Duncan drew back, his face once more guarded. It had been a surprise to Rìona to find he was reluctant to ask her to seduce the king, though he would do so out of grim necessity. She did not flatter herself that she was a superlative fighter. Competent, yes, but certainly not on a level with the legends of the Grey Wardens. Why else would he have recruited her?

_"I've been many things in my life,"_ he had answered when she put the question to him, _"but never a whore-master."_

_"Is that what you consider me, then?"_ she had shot back, stung by his choice of words. _"A whore?"_

_"Your father was my dearest friend, and I cared for your family, but I have no illusions about the political gambits they played. They conducted their seductions and affairs for power and advancement."_

"For the good of Ferelden," Rìona pointed out.

_"Perhaps so. Regardless, had you not set your sights on a crown, they would have acted as your panderers to advance their cause still further,"_ Duncan said implacably . _"And now I would send you to the king's bed to further my own aims. What else should I call it?"_

_"Very well, so be it."_ Rìona lifted her chin proudly. _"My mother was a whore in truth, and still one of the most gracious and beautiful women ever to walk the earth. I could do worse than to emulate her. But no mere coin shall be my price. Rather, the end of a Blight and a crown upon my head."_

"Unless you manage to convince King Cailan to fall back, you have two days until we can delay the Joining ritual no longer," Duncan informed her, pulling her from her ruminations as he led her across the bridge into the ruined stronghold. "I'm sorry I cannot give you more time. Today you may take your time and become acquainted with the encampment here and... prepare yourself for your supper with the king. There are two other recruits, and a junior member of the order named Alistair to whom you will be reporting tomorrow to prepare for the Joining."

Rìona nodded, then asked, "Shall I take Conall to the kennels when I go to the king's tent for supper, or may he stay with you? I fear he may be in the way."

Duncan didn't actually wince, but he did look pained at the matter-of-fact reminder of the task she was undertaking at his behest, and it gave her a cruel sort of satisfaction to see it, for which she immediately felt guilty. He didn't deserve her ire; for the most part he had been kind and courteous along their journey. But his discomfort was an affront to her. She did not object to what he wanted her to do nearly so much as she objected to his misgivings about the matter. She did not feel ashamed of who her parents had raised her to be or the skills they had taught her, so why should he?

Duncan nodded once and Rìona knelt beside Conall, rubbing his ears and patting his solid, muscled chest. He was familiar, the last thing she had of home, save Duncan. She let him nuzzle her face as she spoke softly to him. "Go with Duncan, boy. He'll get some food for you. I'll come get you tonight, before I retire."

She watched as her mabari walked away with the Grey Warden, a strange heaviness in her limbs that made it difficult to want to continue forward. Instead, she turned and looked out over the side of the bridge into the canyon. She felt light-headed for one insane instant as she imagined flinging herself off the parapet into the valley below, feeling the wind whistle past her as she flew.

Then she stepped back quickly, wondering whatever had possessed her to think such a thing.

She made her way rapidly across the bridge, pausing to talk with one of the guards briefly to get an idea of how the camp was laid out. As she did so, she made herself thrust away the lingering sense of reluctance she felt regarding her appointed task. This was what she had wanted, a chance at winning the king to advance her family and undo the harmful guidance he was receiving from his advisers. All that time spent learning about sensuality and the art of the courtesan under her mother's tutelage, all the years of waiting long past the time when her body felt desperately ready for a lover, all of it had led to this. Tonight her wait would end.

Rìona paused a moment, closed her eyes, embraced it. Pleasure was her art. It was not merely that she was skilled in pleasing a partner, for any common strumpet could learn tricks that would bring her patron to release. No, she had been taught to take genuine joy in giving pleasure and to respond to a lover's caresses with unfeigned delight. Fear, embarrassment, humiliation, even pain could be transformed to desire, and that was the skill she had learned, as her mother had all those years ago in Antiva.

So be it. She let the anticipation of the night to come fill her, let it tingle through her, making her body deliciously aware of all the sensation about her. She envisioned Cailan's beautiful golden hair, imagined the feel of it sliding through her fingers. She pictured him above her, his weight heavy upon her, his skin gliding over hers, his hands on her breasts...

...Yes. There it was. Desire. A tension began to build within her belly that owed little to nervousness, though there was that as well. Fear of the inevitable, fear of the unknown. Tonight she would learn if all her learning and hypothetical knowledge would hold up to the reality of the event.

She did not have a great deal of time in which to work. Had she launched this assault at court in Denerim as she had planning it, it would have been a months-long, drawn out seduction, a carefully choreographed dance in which she called the tune. Now she must work quickly. Since she could not guarantee an excuse to visit his tent every day, that meant the matter needed to be accomplished in a single night. One night to ensnare him, and then mere days to convince him to wed her and pull back the army to await reinforcements. It seemed an impossible task.

The first detail, however, was convincing him to bed her. That shouldn't be too much of a challenge. It wasn't often all that difficult to turn a man's thoughts to pleasure. Cailan had been away from the court at Denerim with the queen and all its willing women for nearly two months now. It was likely the longest he'd gone without feminine companionship since his adolescence. Unless he'd been to visit the inevitable camp of whores that followed an army this size to service the troops—improbable, for no king would share a whore who lay with common soldiers unless he wanted to catch a pox—he was no doubt feeling the deprivation by now.

However, she had to bed him without seeming to be an easy conquest, and _that_ could be difficult on such short acquaintance, if half of what she knew about the king was true.

Cailan was a kind man, according to the gossip Rìona had collected such avidly from court, determined to know what she could about the king before she launched her assault. Good-natured and kind, yes, but also vain, impetuous and spoiled.

The queen was a beautiful woman and Cailan appeared to admire her and take pleasure in having a lovely and astute wife. But there were plenty of noblewomen at court eager bed the king. He conducted himself with discretion so as not to bring shame to his queen, but the lack of gossip issuing from the kings bedchamber was telling, for if he had been refusing such offers word would have been all over the kingdom. No, if one read between the lines, it was obvious that he was careful, but that he had no compunctions about taking what they offered freely.

If Rìona gave herself to him easily, he would have her and think no further on the matter. She was not demure by nature; her upbringing had seen to that. But the king would require something to distinguish her from the other noblewomen who bedded him.

She must let him think her modest, perhaps reluctantly interested. She would allow Cailan to believe he was the aggressor, the predator rather than the prey. If she was reluctant—no, _unwilling_. If she could make him desperate enough to force her then she would have a handle on his conscience.

It was an audacious plan, and an uncertain one. If the king turned out to be more gallant than gossip had allowed for, it would fail, for no man could be made to rape a woman unless he already had it within him to do so. It would also put her in the uncomfortable position of having to carry out the charade of the reluctant maid and limit the skills she could put to use.

Still, it was the best option for bringing the matter to a swift conclusion, even if it was certain to be less enjoyable for her. It would be less painful, she knew, if she could induce him to take her gently, to prepare and arouse her. But she didn't have that sort of time. Pleasure would have to come at a later date, once her hold on him was secure.

Her armor posed a problem for the scheme, she realized as she mulled over her plan, considering its advantages and drawbacks. She had fled from Highever with nothing but the armor she had donned when she realized the castle was under attack and her weapons. What money she had been able to salvage from the treasury when she had retrieved the Cousland family sword would need to be spent carefully, on armor repairs and supplies. But removing armor piece by piece required time and deliberation; it was not simple matter to be accomplished while the wearer resisted.

But... no, that could work also. If she orchestrated the scene carefully enough, it might even add credence to her performance.

Having a plan calmed her, focused her, overrode her unaccountable reluctance with a sense of purpose. She would do her duty, for the Couslands and Ferelden and the Grey Wardens.

Maker help them all.


	4. Chapter Four: Droit de Seigneur

The king's "tent" was actually a sumptuous silk pavilion. When Rìona announced herself to the guard standing outside the tent flap she identified herself as Lady Cousland, rather than a Grey Warden, wishing to emphasize her noble lineage. The guard courteously preceded her into the tent and announced her with ceremony. Cailan straightened from glancing down at a map-strewn table and beamed at her.

"My dear Lady Cousland, welcome! You may go, Elric," he said to the guard who had escorted her inside.

"Thank you, Your Majesty," Rìona replied, bowing. She wished she had a gown, that she might make a graceful curtsy, but it would look absurd in armor if she tried. She'd left off her spaulders, gloves and vambraces, as well as her greaves, leaving only her cuirass, the leather war skirt, and her boots. The cuirass fit oddly, for she'd foregone the strips of linen with which she normally bound her breasts, and she felt strangely cool and bare beneath her war skirt in only her smallclothes without the usual leather loin covering. Those last two omissions were the riskiest, for they stood the chance of making her seem overeager if Cailan turned out to be familiar with women in armor. She was hoping his taste ran more to the pampered and gowned damsels of the court than the women of arms. If not, then she could try to excuse it as a concession to comfort after a long day in her armor.

She had bathed carefully with a bucket of frigid water in her tent that afternoon, and allowed herself to part with a few coins to purchase an attar of roses from one of the camp strumpets. She'd used a very sparing amount of the perfumed oil, enough to give the hint of fragrance without actually being discernible, and had massaged it into her scalp. That was the most she could do for vanity's sake.

Unfortunately, she felt even less graceful and feminine once she saw that the king had changed out of his armor and wore a satin-piped doublet and breeches with gold embroidery. The saffron and cream hues of his clothing seemed to emphasize his golden coloring, making him somehow even more dazzling than his gleaming armor had.

Another, smaller table toward the middle of the pavilion was laid out with a mouth-watering repast. Roasted meats and tubers with gravy, stewed and candied fruits, a flagon of rich red wine. It was the finest food Rìona had seen since fleeing Highever, and she eyed it hungrily as the king dismissed his guard and the servant laying out the meal.

The dismissal of the servant pleased Rìona, for it was a very improper thing to do. Had Cailan's intentions been innocent, he would have kept the servant on to serve them their supper. If he wanted privacy, he no doubt had a more intimate arrangement in mind.

The tent was lit by oil lamps, and at the far end of the pavilion, a high pallet draped in satins and fur coverlets seemed almost prominently lit, its comfortable softness and warmth beckoning.

Perhaps this wouldn't be so challenging after all. The king was already primed. Now she merely needed to set the flint to the tinder and strike.

"The Warden-Commander has asked me to deliver this message," she said, stepping forward to offer him a rolled parchment. Duncan had given her an odd look when she'd asked him to write out something she could deliver to Cailan when she went to dine with him, but he'd obliged her by penning a short statement about the readiness of the Grey Wardens in camp, even though it was information he could easily have delivered in person. Now, Rìona allowed it to fall from her fingertips the instant before the king managed to grab for it, and it dropped to the elaborate rug covering the ground on the floor of the tent.

"I'm terribly sorry, Your Majesty! Forgive my clumsiness!" she said, looking up at Cailan with wide, nervous eyes as she knelt at his feet, retrieving the parchment. She lingered there just long enough to see awareness of the suggestive position flare in his vivid blue eyes. She was halfway back to her feet before he remembered to courteously extend a hand to help her rise.

"It's quite all right, Lady Rìona," the king said gallantly, taking his time about releasing her hand once he had it. He took the parchment and laid it carelessly aside, not bothering to crack the seal or check if its contents were of any import. "Here, have some wine. You seem disconcerted."

She allowed him to hold her hand until he had seated her at the table and handed her a goblet of wine warmed to ward off the chill of the late autumn evening. She waited until the king had seated himself before taking a deep draught, feeling its effects almost immediately warming her empty belly. Cailan smiled in satisfaction before taking a much more modest sip, and Rìona had to suppress a smile of her own, covering the quirk of her lips with her goblet. He thought to get her well into her cups before initiating his planned seduction. She had no great objection to that scheme.

"I confess I am disconcerted, Your Majesty," she said, affecting a wide-eyed stare as Cailan cut a few slices of succulent roast pork and laid them upon her plate. It spoke of his dedication to his intended seduction that he, the king, served her with his own hands, but Rìona acted charmed by his gallantry, as though unaware of his motives. "You're most generous to invite me to sup with you this evening. It's a bit overwhelming, I've not even been to court much and now here I am dining with the king."

"And why haven't you been to court?" Cailan asked, serving himself. "Surely you're of an age to have been presented already!"

"My mother and father were very protective," Rìona answered with a small, sad smile. She lowered her eyes and took another sip of her wine, feeling its numbing effects already going to her head, so that he did not see her disgust at her own dishonesty for invoking her parents in the telling of a falsehood. "They feared the decadence and intrigues of the court might prove a harmful influence."

"We are not so decadent as all that," the king chided, digging into his meal with the enthusiasm and vigor of an active young man while Rìona picked at her own plate, daintily spearing small bites upon her table dagger. "We Fereldans are a simple, unpretentious lot, after all. But then, perhaps your parents had other plans for you. Rumor has it they intended a foreign betrothal for you."

Rìona ducked her head modestly. "There was some talk to that effect."

"And did nothing ever come of it, Lady Rìona? Or is it Teyrna Cousland now?"

"My father intended the teyrnir for my brother, if he lives, sire. Is Your Majesty asking if I am betrothed?"

"I find it difficult to believe you're not already wed."

"The teyrn and teyrna were quite exacting in their standards for a suitable match," she replied. "So, no, there was never any betrothal, Your Majesty."

Again, that satisfied smile. Seeing his pleasure, Rìona began to understand that the king operated under his own strange code of chivalry. He would not poach a young noblewoman already sworn to an advantageous match, but if the lady was unattached, he would do his best to seduce her.

They spoke inconsequentially of the upcoming battle and Cailan's admiration for the Grey Wardens as they dined. All the while his expression grew more satisfied with every drink of wine she took, every shy smile she let him draw from her. She could not help but feel a sense of elation to see the game unfolding so beautifully, particularly when she let herself dwell on the secret knowledge that the predator was actually the prey.

"You must call me Cailan, Rìona," the king said after a moment, his voice dropping to a sensual murmur that caressed her ears. "I insist upon it. Loghain and I don't stand on ceremony, and as the daughter of a teyrn your rank is equal to his, so I see no need for formalities between us."

"You'll forgive me for saying so, Your—_Cailan_," Rìona gave him an innocent look as she wiped her hands and took another drink of wine, "but you and I do not enjoy the intimate relationship you have with Teyrn Loghain."

The king's smile turned decidedly wicked as he practically pounced on the bait she trawled before him. "_That_ is precisely the problem I intend to rectify!"

Rìona frowned, as though perplexed by his innuendo. Wiping his own hands on a linen cloth, he rose from the table and approached her, taking one of her hands and squeezing it warmly. "I'm afraid I don't understand... Cailan," she murmured as he assisted her out of her chair.

"Your father was a dear friend and I valued his council greatly," the king said, caressing her hand. Rìona let herself squirm uncomfortably at his nearness. "I see no reason why you and I should not build upon that close association."

"I see." She attempted to withdraw her hand from his, only to find he would not let it go. "I would be honored to be taken into your confidence, Your Majesty."

"Cailan," he chided, lifting her hand to press a kiss upon the knuckles, then taking the other one and doing likewise.

"Cailan."

Rìona remembered her conversation with Duncan that afternoon in Highever, before the attack, and how she had told him that it was impossible to feign affection for long without beginning to actually feel it. The same, she realized, was true of innocence. Her heart was pounding in her chest, her breath coming short and shallow at the king's persistent nearness. She felt as flustered as the naïve maiden she portrayed. There was no need to affect the shiver that ran through her at the warmth of his breath upon her fingers, or her flinch at the subtle, almost accidental touch of his tongue to her skin.

"When this is all over, when the darkspawn have been defeated and Highever is restored to your family, you must come to Denerim and stay at court for a while," the king said, inhaling deeply, and she knew he was breathing in the scent of her hair. He leaned even closer, and Rìona attempted to back away from him, pulling harder to free her hands from his grasp.

"Thank you for the kind invitation to supper, but I beg you to give me leave to return to my tent, Your Majesty," she said in a nervous rush. "It's been a long journey."

"Stay for a while," he coaxed, taking up her goblet and pressing it into her hands. "Have some more wine."

"Really, Your Majesty, I must go. I feel uneasy. I think perhaps it is inappropriate for me to be here, now."

"Nonsense!" he said dismissively.

"Please. I am here unchaperoned, unprotected," she babbled. "With my mother and father gone—"

"That is why you must stay!" Cailan took the opening she offered him. "You have not yet related for me the events at Highever."

She did not need to feign the tears that came to her eyes as she recalled that night, though she despised herself for using the tragedy of her parents' deaths so cynically to advance her game with the king. "I—Forgive me, it turns out I do indeed find it too painful to speak of what happened that night," she murmured, bowing her head sadly.

"Ah, dear heart!" Cailan drew her to him and Rìona went stiffly into his arms, letting herself be embraced uncomfortably. "I am so very grieved for your loss. Stay and know that I only wish to comfort you."

It was a long moment, standing awkwardly in his arms, before she felt the slightest whisper of his lips upon her hair. His warmth began to relax her and make her pliant in his arms as the pressure of his kisses increased, traversing slowly from her hairline down her face.

"Please, Your Majesty!" she whispered tremulously, barely remembering to protest.

"Shh," he said, cupping her face, and his lips covered hers.

His mouth plied hers expertly, and it was all Rìona could do to keep from employing her own skill to reciprocate. Instead, she forced herself to stillness, to unresponsiveness, as his lips parted hers and his tongue gently swept across her unmoving mouth. It was delicious, the taste and scent of him, spicy with wine, bringing forth a surge of desire that relaxed her limbs. She leaned closer without ever intending to do so and he hummed in satisfaction as his arms went around her and drew her flush against him.

She let her mouth open to his insistent pressure, tasted wine on his tongue as it glided, slick and warm, against her own. She wanted to press herself into him, but she restrained herself to trembling compliance, her tongue cautiously flicking against his.

"Sweet Rìona..." the king murmured, pulling away to smile at her, caressing her arms, the back of her neck, letting his thumbs sweep along her cheekbones as he took her face in his hands once more and nibbled lightly upon her lips.

"I cannot!" she said weakly, ducking away as he moved in to deepen the kiss once more. "Please, Your Majesty..."

"Cailan," he corrected, seeking out the sensitive juncture where her shoulder curved into her neck and sucking upon the ridge there.

"Cailan. Please!"

"Tell me what you need, dear heart," the king murmured encouragingly, biting lightly upon her earlobe.

"I must go!"

"You must stay."

His lips closed over hers again, less cautiously, more demanding. Of their own volition, Rìona's lips responded, grasping, sucking, thrilling at the sensation of his golden stubble chafing her face, at the silken texture of his hair as her hands found their way into it. She fed on that kiss, on the flood of awareness and vitality it brought coursing through her veins. For all misgivings at engaging in this game with Cailan, once begun, it was marvelous. Here was something alive in the midst of all the death and numbness around her, and perhaps even the promise of a future arising from the ashes of her past. Here, she could feel again. Here, she could be alive again.

It wasn't until she felt his hands on the buckles of her cuirass, pulling with deliberate intent, that Rìona recalled her purpose and made a shrill, urgent sound of protest, wrenching her mouth from his.

"No! Your Majesty, please, I cannot!"

"Of course you can." The buckle over her ribs on the left fell open and he turned his attention to the right.

"Oh, Maker help me, please!" she half-sobbed, trying to move away. Cailan caught her arm and pulled her back. "I mustn't! I've never..."

"I'll be gentle with you, dear heart, but I won't hear of you leaving," he said calmly. The other buckle opened and he drew her cuirass over her head and dropped it to the floor. His hands immediately slid under her fine linen shirt to cup her unbound breasts, and Rìona's knees weakened at the caress of his thumbs across her nipples, her head falling back in pleasure.

"Now come," he coaxed with humor, gently tweaking one nipple and then the other as he nibbled at her neck. "The treasury would be overflowing if I had a sovereign for every court beauty who has proclaimed her virtue in one moment and eagerly beckoned me to lie between her thighs the next. You play it well, but the game of protestation grows wearisome after a while."

His words brought her back to herself and reminded Rìona of her design. She saw now that she was in danger of being taken as lightly as his other conquests and knew she much differentiate herself now, before he became too complacent.

"I am _not_ one of your eager court strumpets!" she snarled, jerking away from him. She stumbled back, seemingly unaware that she was moving further from the entrance rather than toward it.

The king dashed forward, grasping her to him. Without the leather of her cuirass she could feel his arousal, hard and urgent against her stomach. A pang of wanting tightened everything within her, for in that hardness lay the promise of fulfillment she had long denied herself. Now, at last, it could be hers.

Cailan's hands clenched on her arms, more roughly than had been his wont before, his expression irritated. "What are you playing at, girl?" he growled, kissing her hard.

Maker, yes, that was even better, that force, that loss of control. No calculated and rehearsed seduction, this kiss, but genuine passion, bruising and relentless. He devoured her, and Rìona was happy to let herself be devoured, to let herself be steered ever closer to the high, soft bed.

When his hand slid up her bare thigh, moving under the leather strips of her war skirt, she pushed him away so forcefully they both staggered. "No!" she cried, her eyes wide with what she hoped was a convincing display of fear. "Please! I _cannot_! With my parents gone, it's imperative I make a good marriage. I am young and fertile," she pleaded, as though unaware of what these concepts must mean to a king with an aging queen and no heir. "I must look to my future. I must begin rebuilding the Cousland line. My reputation is all I have left!"

"No one shall ever hear of it from my lips," Cailan vowed, once more solicitous as she reminded him of her tragedy. He drew her back to him gently but implacably. "Only let me love you..."

Another kiss, deep and urgent. Rìona let herself melt into it, let him sway her, let him taste her desire. She was trembling, with both yearning and with the fear of the unknown. But then, so was the king. His hands shook as they grasped her face, as they slid through her hair to hold her head to him as he plundered her mouth.

It was exquisite, and Rìona wished she could lose herself within it entirely, she thought as she returned the kiss, yielding to her passion for a moment. Why was there always something else she needed to consider, whether it was the need to halt things before they progressed too far, or the role she must play? Why could she simply not surrender to her desire?

Cailan's hand moved between them, tugging urgently at the laces of his breeches, parting them. And then he had her hand in his, guiding it inside his braies. "Touch me, dear heart," he murmured between kisses, thrusting against her palm. His fingers closed around hers, forcing her to grasp his shaft. It was warm and twitched in her hand. "Feel what you do to me, my sweet? How badly I want you? Maker, yes, like that."

When Rìona hesitated, attempting to shrink away, he seized her more firmly and pumped into her hand again. The silken glide of the skin along his shaft was delightful. She felt moisture upon her palm, felt the pulse and heat of him. She caught his rhythm, let herself stroke him, learned him by touch as he moaned into her mouth. She was eager now, and it was becoming harder to keep her purpose in mind or maintain her charade of reluctance.

Once he was certain of her compliance once more, he released her hand and unfastened the buckle securing the leather war skirt. This was it, then, Rìona thought frantically as he pulled at the straps. Time for the final push to send him beyond the edge of restraint.

"No!" she screamed, shoving at him. She staggered away, casting her eyes about in desperate search of aid. Spying a weapons rack near the stand holding his gleaming golden armor, she sprinted for it and jerked a dagger from its sheath. Before she could turn fully to threaten the king with it, however, Cailan was there, grabbing her wrist in an unbreakable grasp.

"You would raise a blade against your king?" his asked, his eyes angry and his voice laden with arrogant disbelief.

"Please, I beg you, Your Majesty..." she pleaded, tears stinging her eyes as his hand on her wrist squeezed painfully, harder and harder, until her fingers went numb and the dagger clattered uselessly to the rug at their feet. She would bear bruises on her wrist come the morrow. Looking into his eyes, she felt a frisson of true fear, for there was no longer any good-natured playfulness in his expression. Only burning rage and desire, not for shared pleasure, but for conquest. For all his charm and cheerful manners, Cailan was a warrior and she had awakened within him his battle lust, the instinctive drive to defend himself and vanquish his adversaries. She was no longer merely a young woman he was attempting to seduce, but a threatening enemy who must be subdued.

Cailan flung her to the bed so forcefully it drove the breath from her lungs. Before she had recovered, he had jerked off her boots and was insistently tugging her smallclothes down her thighs. He used his knees to push her legs apart and his hands to shove her shirt up to her armpits, baring her breasts. His hands and mouth were no longer gentle as he pulled upon her nipple with his fingers, and scraped the other with his teeth. Rìona moaned desperately, unable to do more than hope the sound came across as dismayed as pleasure surged through her body.

And then he was there, prodding insistently against her sex. She cried out again, struggling to push him away, beating at him with her fists. Seemingly by chance, she caught him across the face, raising scarlet welts on his fair cheek. Incensed, he shoved her down roughly. His eyes blazed with triumph when his hand parted her folds to position himself and came away glistening with her moisture.

He surged forward, heedless of her protests and struggles, driving into her tight, resisting flesh without pause, sundering her carefully preserved maidenhead in a single vicious thrust. And then there was only the pain of being stretched, being filled for the first time.

Rìona squeezed her eyes shut, tears leaking from between her clenched eyelids. Maker, but the pain was more immense than she had been told to expect, and she thrashed her head against the bedding, shaking violently and sobbing. She let him see he hurt her, made no effort to conceal her distress.

Yet through the agony there was exultation, which she could never allow him to see. This was _her_ moment of triumph, rather than his. All the years of waiting had culminated in this, the moment when her virginity was rent upon the king's pallet. And so she tore, embracing the agony, burning, stretching, pulsing, struggling against him, trying to expel him and push him away.

Fully under the sway of his lust, Cailan barely paused, barely gave her time to adapt. He withdrew and forced his way into her body again, renewing the pain that had only just begun to abate, surging in deeper this time, filling her more completely. That tremor in his body was back and she knew he was beyond restraint, beyond control. She cried out with each motion, even as her body loosened and began to accept his intrusion, leaving her with a dull, persistent ache instead of the intense agony of those first few thrusts.

She forced herself to lie there as though defeated while he took her, even when she might have sought more comfort had she moved. Gradually, however, pleasure began to override the discomfort, slowly building within her. She pushed it away, attempted to ignore it, suppressing her moans until she had no option but to give them voice. Finally her hips began to move with inexpert awkwardness, seeking a better angle, more of that sensation filling her with warm tension.

Still the pleasure came, tightening her body, building deep in her belly. Had he touched her at that point, made any effort to satisfy her, she knew she would have shattered into a thousand scintillating slivers. But she had played her part too well. His thoughts were of conquest alone. When the king pushed her knees up, opened her wider, it was to facilitate his own possession of her body, to claim her more deeply, more completely. He was beyond noticing when her cries transformed from pain to pleasure as she felt herself nearing the precipice.

He slammed into her a final time, throwing back his head and giving vent to a guttural groan. He shuddered and pulsed within her, and Rìona sobbed in frustration, her fists clenched upon the bedclothes as her climax slipped elusively away while he grew still above her.

Rìona lay there beneath his weight as he sank down upon her, sweating and panting. It was over. She had done it. The years of scheming and waiting were at an end. She'd lured the king to her just as she'd planned for all those years in Highever, plotting her ascent with her father. She'd done her duty, just as he had bade her.

She astonished herself by bursting into great, wracking sobs of despair, beating her fists helplessly against Cailan's shoulders.

Her tears seemed to bring him back to himself, and suddenly he was the kind and affable, eager puppy of a king he'd been before she had escalated her struggle. His lust sated, he could afford to be gentle, she thought bitterly.

"Oh, dear heart, I'm sorry!" he breathed, a remorseful look on his face as he carefully withdrew from her. In his absence, the air was chill against the foreign wetness on her sex. "It was never my intention to take you like that."

She lay there a long moment, weeping piteously, unable to recall her purpose or the role she was meant to play. Cailan hovered anxiously over her, kissing the tracks of the tears on her face and slowly, Rìona remembered her objective. She pushed at him, struggling to move out from beneath him.

"Do you know what you've done?" she asked, her voice ragged and choked. She tried to draw down her shirt from where it was pushed up above her breasts, attempting to cover herself.

"Forgive me, my sweet. I mistook your protests for a ruse. Maker, I've hurt you!" He stared transfixed at her thighs, reaching out gingerly and bringing back fingers smeared with blood and his own seed. He rolled off the bed and poured water from the ewer at the washstand into a basin and wet a linen cloth, wringing out the excess. The cool, wadded cloth was soothing against her tender flesh, and Rìona could not find it within herself to reject his ministrations and thus only batted halfheartedly at his hands in an effort to swat him away.

"You've ruined me!" she said bitterly when he tossed the stained cloth aside.

Even tending to her injury, Cailan's desire began to stir again and when she would have risen, he urged her to lie back. "Let me make it better for you," he murmured, sliding down to lie with his shoulders between her thighs.

She whimpered as his hand stroked her, fanning the embers of desire where they still smoldered deep within her. "There's nothing you can do."

"I shall give you pleasure," he vowed, pressing a kiss to her inner thigh. "I'm a skilled lover, dear heart. You'll never be left wanting."

His mouth upon her was exquisite, and she wanted nothing more than to accept his offer. But if she denied him now, he would consider the matter unresolved. It would make him want her again. His vanity would be unsalved until he had her willingly, and his desire for her would take root in his mind and grow into something more than an evening's itch, scratched and forgotten.

With her last ounce of determination, she snarled and shoved him away, sitting up. "You've ruined my future!" she cried, glaring at him. "Shall I merely be the king's whore? Better to have died upon Howe's sword than endure such shame!"

"I shall see justice done for your family and heap honors and gifts and accolades upon you!" the king swore passionately, seeking to draw her to him and pressing kisses upon her face. "None shall dare question your honor."

"And what if I'm with child?" she asked, her voice softly venomous. "Will you claim your bastard get or send me off to some back alley witch to deny your sin with the prick of a twig?"

Whether it was the question or the loathing in her tone, her words stopped his attempts at lulling her back to compliance. He sat upon the bed, looking stunned and thoughtful, and Rìona rose, seeking out her smallclothes and the scattered bits of her armor and dressing as quickly as she could.

"May I have your leave, _Your Majesty_?" she asked with cold courtesy. The king stared at her for a long moment, considering, and finally nodded slowly. Rìona sketched a brusque bow and left.

The night was frigid outside the luxury of the king's tent. Torches were ablaze throughout the ruins, casting a deceptively warm red-gold glow over the crumbling masonry and fallen blocks of stone and elongating the shadows of the stone columns. In the valley beyond the ruins, campfires dotted the night and the rough voices and laughter of the soldiers carried on the crisp air. Overhead, clouds had occluded the stars, making the night even darker.

She was sore and weary, and yet restlessness drove her to wander. She felt a strange sense of dissatisfaction with the night's labors, for all that her ploy had worked beautifully. Though aching, her body hummed with unfulfilled arousal, leaving her feeling edgy and unhappy with the thought of retiring to her tent alone.

She wanted her mother, to tend her aches and soothe her troubled spirit. She wanted her father to praise her and tell her she'd done well by capturing the king's interest so easily. She wanted her brother to mourn with her, but she was alone. Beside Conall, there was only one remnant left of her life back in Highever. Only one person remained who knew her.

The sense of something left undone carried her not to her own tent, but to Duncan's. Conall, lying outside, gave a welcoming whine and Rìona rubbed his ears for a moment, then shushed him. She looked about to make sure no one was nearby to observe her and then lifted the flap and ducked inside. No candle or lamp glowed within, but the unmistakable sound of a dagger being unsheathed reached her as Duncan sat up on his pallet.

"It's done," she murmured, wondering again at the unhappiness she felt over that fact.

"I see." His voice was flat and empty. She wished she could see his face, to know whether the displeasure she thought she heard was true. "Where does the king stand on the matter of pulling the army back and waiting for reinforcements?"

"The groundwork has been laid, but he's not there. Yet."

"If you cannot convince him by the end of the day tomorrow, we must proceed with the Joining with no more delay," Duncan reminded her.

"He will summon me tomorrow, I guarantee it. Simply make certain I am available to answer his call and I will continue to work on him."

Her feet bore her toward him until she stood over him, making out his form in the darkness within the tent. "We have matters unresolved between us," she stated, unbuckling the cuirass she had donned in haste. "I would see them settled before I progress any further with the king."

"Are you certain that's the wisest course?" he asked cautiously, but there was a low note of wanting within his voice he could not disguise, and despite her aches, Rìona felt her body responding. Cailan had merely been a prelude. This was where the end of her waiting lay.

"I'm certain of absolutely nothing," she said, desire surging even as she was once again aware of that hollow discontent in her soul. She knelt, straddling his lap and his hands came up to grasp her hips. "_Now, fuck me._"


	5. Chapter Five: Points of Contention

Her second day at Ostagar dawned cold and gray, not entirely unusual for an early Firstfall morning, though Duncan assured Rìona that as the darkspawn horde drew nearer, the clouds would become even darker and heavier. She had left him long before dawn, for the situation with Cailan was still too tenuous for her to be caught sleeping in Duncan's tent. Despite her lack of sleep, her mood felt lighter than it had since they had fled Highever. It was as though the culmination of all those weeks of awareness and wanting that had passed between her and Duncan since they'd left Highever had eased something within her, some terrible burden she hadn't known she carried.

It was more than just pleasure, or the fulfillment of desire, or even finally having the freedom to use her body as she'd been taught to do, the way she'd postponed doing for such a maddeningly long time. There had been something healing in what had passed between them in the night. She was connected to someone again, someone who knew her, someone with whom she did not have to pretend. She no longer had to be cautious with Duncan, as she'd had to be during their long journey when their joint control had hung by a thread. She felt free for the first time since she'd resolved to become the queen all those years ago.

Her only regret was that she could never have Duncan without reservations, for she could not risk conceiving his child. Though he had assured her it was unlikely, they both understood that they could not take the chance. And so, in the middle of their pleasure, they'd been forced to interrupt themselves, both of them bitter and frustrated over the necessity.

The result was that she was sore but replete, and determined to leave behind her melancholy and enjoy her newfound freedom to revel in pleasures that had for so long been nothing more than an abstract theory. Nothing need restrain her now but the necessity for discretion. This was what her parents had taught her since the day her courses first began. That day, Eleanor Cousland had spoken to her at length about the changes her body would undergo and the marvelous feats of which she would be capable. Finally, she had gifted Rìona with with her well-read copy of _The Art of Passionate Love_ and encouraged her to explore herself and come to understand her pleasure, and to never be ashamed of the purposes for which the Maker had crafted her body.

Rìona knew her upbringing had been unconventional. Though there was nothing in the Chant of Light forbidding carnal pleasures, for some reason as the ages passed, the doctrine of the Chantry had become more and more restrictive on such matters. It had begun with forbidding marriage to the priesthood, and then swearing their templars to lifelong chastity. Once that was accomplished, the Chantry began proscribing erotic texts. Eventually sensuality somehow came to be condemned as one of the steps down the path of wickedness. The Chantry was often unhappy with the teachings bestowed upon the Antivan courtesans for precisely that purpose, for they were taught not about sex for the purpose of dutiful procreation within marriage, but for the sake of pleasure alone. Teyrna Eleanor had told her that the courtesans who walked the noble gardens and palaces of Antiva lived in fear of the day the Chantry would declare a new Exalted March to put an end to their institution.

When Rìona had asked why, her parents had few answers.

_"Likely, it's about controlling the minds of the populace, pup,"_ Bryce Cousland had theorized. _"In order to create virtue, you must first create sin. For a while, magic served that purpose, but since not everyone is a mage, the Chantry needed some way to control the rest of the population. How better to win the compliance of the people than to take their most primal and basic need—and also the need most likely to cause them extremes of emotion and anxiety—and transform it into a sin? They convince the people it's something wicked, something that requires the sanction of the Chantry in order to be virtuous. Once people begin believing that their most fundamental needs are inherently sinful, and that only by adhering to the teachings of the Chantry may they become good, well, they're willing to do or believe just about anything, and are much more apt to abide by the Chantry's authority."_

It was from such ideological servitude her parents had sought to free her with their teachings above love and pleasure, and the best tribute she could possibly pay to them now would be to celebrate what they had taught her, to use the skills they had given her. She still felt a plaguing uncertainty about the wisdom of her scheme regarding the king, an unease to which she could not put a name, but she had her duty. She would meet it, and she would not constrain herself from savoring the pleasures it had to offer along the way.

All the endless aching years of virginity were behind her, and now that she no longer had to play the chaste maiden, she could allow Cailan to begin "teaching" her to enjoy his lovemaking and to give him pleasure. If she happened to prove an eager and imaginative pupil, well, he ought to be thrilled to discover she was everything Queen Anora was purported not to be.

Assuming, of course, that the matter continued to progress as smoothly as it had begun.

Keeping in mind her certainty that the king would summon her that day to resolve the affair as she had left it the previous evening, Duncan arranged matters so that she might stay close to the ruins, rather than going down to the army encampment to meet the other Grey Wardens. Unless the command to break camp and fall back was given that day, tomorrow she would prepare for her Joining ritual, the details of which Duncan would still not reveal to her.

Thus, she found herself wandering with Conall at her side, exploring in a way she hadn't been able to the day before due to her preoccupation with her upcoming supper with the king. She lingered a particularly long time near a commander lecturing some new arrivals on the darkspawn. They had actually brought a darkspawn corpse up to show the soldiers, instructing them on how to avoid being infected by the corruption the darkspawn spread. Rìona stared at it, horrified, unable to comprehend the existence of something so monstrous, much less that a horde of thousands of such creatures was advancing upon them. Now she understood somewhat Duncan's anxiety that they have sufficient forces to combat the creatures.

It was at the opposite end of the ruins that she unknowingly encountered her would-be guide, Alistair, involved in a quarrel with a disgruntled mage. Seeing him in profile, her first thought was that she had accidentally come across the king, until she realized his hair was darker and redder and worn in a plaited queue behind his head rather than loose down his back. His slightly rusted armor was cheaply made and ill-fitting.

"Get out of my way, fool!" the mage snarled and stomped off, and with a crooked smile the young man turned to look at Rìona with an astonishing pair of hazel eyes so light a shade that they seemed to glow golden-amber.

"You know, one good thing about the Blight is how it brings people together."

She stared at him a moment, unable at first to credit his jaunty humor in the face of the mage's rudeness. Yet his words awakened her sense of irony, particularly given the previous night and her objectives with Cailan.

Rìona shook her head, amused and perplexed. "I... know exactly what you mean."

"It's like a party," he continued cheerfully. "We could all stand in a circle and hold hands. _That_ would give the darkspawn something to think about."

It had been so many weeks since Rìona had really known laughter or teasing that it felt odd and awkward, leaving her uncertain how to respond, especially given the grimness of their present situation. "You're a very strange man."

"You're not the first woman to tell me that," he shrugged, though some of the laughter in his eyes dimmed and for an instant he looked a little injured by her words. "Wait, we haven't met, have we?"

Rìona was on the verge of introducing herself when a guard in royal livery approached her. She recognized him as the guard who had stood outside Cailan's tent the previous evening and felt a blush heat her cheeks, unable to imagine what he had heard or what he might have made of it. Of course, the king had lived with the presence of his guards his entire life; no doubt his personal guards were inured his activities by now.

"Lady Cousland," the guard said, bowing deeply. "Forgive the interruption, but the king bids you attend him."

"Lady Cousland?" A note of surprise raised the tone of Alistair's voice and she turned her attention back to him. "_You're_ Duncan's new recruit from Highever?"

"I am," she replied sedately. "I thought you didn't know who I was."

"I didn't, until I remembered the commander of the Highever forces that arrived a few days ago was Lord Cousland. Duncan sent word ahead that he had a recruit. Allow me to introduce myself. I'm Alistair, the new Grey Warden. Though I guess you knew that."

"Actually, no, not until you mentioned Duncan. It's a pleasure to meet you. I'm supposed to report to you at some point today, I realize, but..." she gestured helplessly at the waiting guard, and Alistair nodded, something bitter twisting his lips.

"Can't ignore a royal summons, now, can we?" he asked, his earlier jocularity now coming across as forced and unnatural. "Find me when you're done and we'll go over what will be expected of you in the next few days."

Confused by his sudden, poorly-disguised ill-humor, Rìona nodded her farewells and fell into step beside the royal guard. She felt Alistair's eyes following her across the ruins, but she waited until he was out of hearing range to speak.

"Elric, is it?"

"Yes, my lady. Elric Maraigne."

"How long have you been in the king's service, Elric?" she asked cautiously.

"Since before he was the king, my lady," the guard answered. "I came on as one of Prince Cailan's personal guards when he was just a lad."

"I see," she said softly. "Surely the king is fortunate to have such a loyal guardsman for so many years."

Though she was unable to see much of his expression beneath his helmet, Maraigne's voice was hesitant. "It's been an honor serving him, my lady. Being with him as long as I have, I've seen His Majesty through a fair number of adolescent scrapes. He confides in me sometimes. It's my privilege to keep his secrets and confidences..." the guard cleared his throat meaningfully. "...as well as those of the people he spends time with."

Rìona sighed with relief, a tension she didn't even know she'd been holding draining from her. This guard was no threat to her, nor did he pose any danger of spreading gossip.

"I see," she repeated, giving him a smile. "Thank you, Elric."

"My pleasure, my lady," he said with a bow, and held open the flap of the king's tent for her.

Within she found the king perusing maps and debating strategy with a large, dark man she knew only by reputation: Teyrn Loghain, the king's father-in-law and general of the royal army.

Rìona bowed deeply and formally, giving no indication of familiarity.

"I was summoned, Your Majesty?" she asked, her voice devoid of any inflection.

"Yes, please, come in, Lady Cousland!" Cailan greeted her, turning his back on Loghain far more quickly than he should have. Rìona watched with alarm as Loghain's sharp eyes took in the fact that the king immediately focused his attention on her. Cailan, obviously, was neither a discreet nor a subtle man, and the queen's father was no fool.

"Cousland?" the teyrn repeated coldly, and something in his tone—a hint of surprise, perhaps—caught her suspicions. Had the king already told his general what had happened at Highever? If not, then why was he so surprised to see another Cousland here at Ostagar?

"Yes. Bryce's youngest. Lady Rìona, are you acquainted with Teyrn Loghain, my general?"

"No, Your Majesty, I've never had the pleasure. It's an honor to meet you, Teyrn Loghain. My father often spoke highly of you as a military leader," Rìona said diplomatically, not adding that her father had disliked the Teyrn of Gwaren and considered him a prejudiced fool. In the Landsmeet, they often stood opposed to one another, particularly in the matter of opening trade and diplomatic relations with Orlais. Bryce Cousland had supported the idea, for not only was Highever was a port city which stood to profit greatly from freer trade with Orlais, but he also was certain that alliances with their neighbors would strengthen Ferelden. Loghain, however, had been vehemently opposed, unwilling to put the Orlesian occupation in the past and look toward the future.

Recalling this, Rìona realized just which of the king's advisers was opposed to calling for reinforcements from Orlais, and cursed herself for being so distracted by other matters that she had not put it together before.

Loghain regarded Rìona disdainfully, giving voice to a coolly proper greeting that didn't reach his eyes. She recalled that her father's other complaint about Loghain was that, despite having been elevated to the highest ranks of the nobility and having a daughter who was the queen, he had a freeholder's contempt for the noble-born as well as a certain resentment that despite his title and all he had done to earn it, many nobles still regarded him as a jumped-up commoner. Having married a commoner himself, Bryce Cousland had never been one of those, and yet that fact hadn't seemed to quell Loghain's resentment toward him.

"Lady Rìona is Duncan's newest recruit," Cailan explained to his general after the introductions had been made.

"You're summoning Grey Warden recruits to your tent for conferences now?" Loghain asked, barely concealing his derision. Rìona fought to keep her face expressionless. Any movement from her, a blush, or dropping her eyes to the floor, anything would only confirm the general's insinuation.

"The Grey Wardens are essential to our victory here, Loghain," Cailan chided, though he was not entirely successful at concealing his own guilt. "But I've summoned Lady Rìona to discuss Arl Howe's actions at Highever. That he has failed to deliver his troops here to Ostagar as he was bidden can only confirm that he has, indeed, turned traitor."

"Lady?" Loghain's brows lifted, and he ignored Cailan's mention of Howe so completely that Rìona couldn't help feel he was determined not to discuss the matter. "My understanding is that Grey Wardens don't hold titles of nobility."

"In light of the grave injustice done to the Couslands when Highever was overtaken by Arl Howe, as well as the fact that so few Couslands remain alive, it may be necessary to make an exception in this case," Cailan said. "It has become a point of honor to restore the teyrnir to the Couslands, no matter what their circumstances. However, nothing can be decided until after the battle, when Fergus Cousland returns from the Wilds, so there's little point in discussing it now. Leave us, Loghain. I will discuss the situation in Highever with Lady Rìona and reconvene with you after the midday meal."

The look Loghain gave the king for the briefest moment was one of fury at the casual dismissal. He brushed past Rìona, making her acutely aware of the fact that he was a huge man who towered above her. She felt overwhelmed by his sheer physical presence in such close proximity. He stormed from the tent, and she found herself alone with Cailan.

Though his expression was grave he was still every inch the golden king despite the fact that he had not yet donned his gleaming armor that day. "Thank you for answering my summons so quickly. I've been beside myself with worry for you since last night. Are you well? Tell me you are well. I shall simply die of remorse if you are not."

"I am well, Your Majesty," she said, deliberately refusing to show him any warmth. "And I was not aware that I had a choice regarding answering a royal summons."

"Ah, I see you are still cherishing some resentment toward me for my boorish behavior," Cailan observed, his attitude so uncommonly sincere and sober that Rìona found herself wondering if all that shallow and flamboyant charm was a facade. "I suppose I've earned that."

"Does Your Majesty have matters you wish to discuss regarding the Grey Wardens?" she asked, her tone deliberately, mockingly obsequious. "If not, I pray, grant me leave before I find my reputation shredded beyond repair."

"I do have matters I wish to discuss with you, though not pertaining to the Grey Wardens," Cailan stated, crossing to a locked chest and pulling from it a rolled parchment.

"Please, Your Majesty, I cannot—" Rìona began to protest, but the king cut her off.

"Hear me out before you become alarmed," he interrupted. "It's possible that what I have to say may warm your regard of me somewhat. Here. Read this."

Frowning in consternation, Rìona noted the parchment bore the seal of the Arl of Redcliffe. She unrolled it and read the brief missive, then looked at Cailan in feigned confusion. "It's a letter from Arl Eamon," she said slowly, "asking Your Majesty not to go into battle beside the Grey Wardens, but to wait for reinforcements."

"And?"

Rìona drew a deep breath, proceeding carefully. "And he entreats Your Majesty to consider revisiting the subject of the realm's need for a royal heir."

"My queen is childless, as everyone in the entire kingdom is well aware." The vigor of the king's gesticulations gave evidence to his frustration with the subject. "Eamon is hardly the first nobleman to broach the subject with me, though as my uncle he has been one of the most persistent. In fact, I daresay your father is one of the few who has never pressed me on the matter. Anora and I have been wed five years, and I've been dutiful in my attempts to get an heir on her, but to no avail."

"Then I'm sorry for the queen," Rìona said properly. "And for Your Majesty."

"Empress Celene of Orlais has been hinting that we might form a 'permanent alliance' between Ferelden and Orlais, by which, of course, she means I ought to consider annulling my marriage to the queen and marrying her instead." Cailan snorted. Rìona felt a sickening sense of shock in her stomach; such an idea had never occurred to her. "In fact, she's intimated that's to be the price of her aid against the Blight, should I ask for it. The empress is a lovely woman, and our meetings have been... pleasant, but she's even older than Anora. If I should die before she does—and given the rumors of her uncle's assassination, that seems a likely possibility—and fail to leave an heir, it would effectively put Ferelden back under Orlesian rule. The Landsmeet would never hear of such a possibility, even if I were willing to consider it."

That assessment was more politically aware than she had suspected the king capable of being. Flamboyant and foolhardy Cailan might be, but he was not totally ignorant of political realities. Rìona kept her eyes on the floor as she asked carefully, "Why are you telling me this, Your Majesty?"

"There are a number of reasons I have been so opposed to annulling my marriage to Anora thus far," Cailan stated. "I have remained steadfast out of gratitude for all the Mac Tir clan has done for Ferelden, and because Anora is a capable and popular queen. I felt that I ought to at least give her a chance, especially since we were so fond of each other as children. I said your father never pressed me on the subject of setting Anora aside, and that is true. But Bryce did give me one piece of advice when I sought it, and that was to have another bride chosen before I undertook any such action, should I ever decide to do so. He said that if I set the queen aside, the chaos that would descend would be nearly as vicious as if I died without leaving an heir, with every noble household in Ferelden scrambling to put forth their daughters."

Rìona looked up at him in unfeigned shock. Her father had never mentioned having any such discussion with the king. How subtly he must have played his game, to feed such an idea to Cailan without making it seem he was presenting his own daughter for consideration! She wondered how long her father had been preparing the king for this day.

"If there has been one other point of contention in the realm regarding my marriage," Cailan explained, "it's over the fact that, despite Loghain's elevation to the nobility, Anora is still considered by many to be a commoner with a commoner's blood. But to marry a Cousland, one of the oldest noble families in Ferelden, no one could question that. The people are fond of Anora, for she is lovely and the daughter of a national hero. But when the realm learns how heroically you survived Arl Howe's treachery to become a Grey Warden, when we ride back to Denerim side by side covered in glory after defeating the Blight, _you'll_ be the one the bards compose ballads about. You're young and beautiful and brave. You'll be the sweetheart of the entire kingdom!"

She held her silence, unwilling to speak lest she seem too eager or make Cailan doubt that this was all his own idea. She watched him with wide, wary eyes, as though unable to believe that he was actually suggesting that he marry her.

Cailan approached her and wrapped his hands around her upper arms, caressing gently as she affected a flinch. "I cannot change what happened last night," he said softly. "I treated you brutishly, and I would make amends. It has never been my wont to force reluctant maidens. I should like to rectify the matter as best I can. By marrying you, not only do I alleviate your own difficult situation, but I resolve a dilemma that has been plaguing me for some time. It seems a perfect solution. So tell me, dear heart, would you like to be queen?"

Rìona breathed a long, shaky sigh. This was the moment of her triumph, everything she had worked and waited for over the last several years. So why did it feel like the teeth of a trap closing around her?

"I... never dreamed you would make me such an offer, Your Majesty," she lied, though the tremor in her voice was not entirely false. "I thank you, and I... accept, pending my brother's approval, of course."

"Marvelous!" Cailan beamed at her, taking her hands in his and pressing ardent kisses to them. "I shall begin putting matters in order after the battle and request the annulment from the Grand Cleric when I return to Denerim. Then I shall announce our betrothal to the Landsmeet and we may begin planning our wedding."

Rìona allowed herself to smile tremulously at the king, despite the unexpected sense of foreboding that had accompanied his proposal. She had secured his interest. Now she must make him adore her. For that, charm would be a much more effective tool than reproach.

"As you wish, Your Majesty."

"Cailan!" he corrected, leaning in to kiss her. His lips were gentle, teasing, and Rìona let herself respond with shy hesitation. When he drew back again, his eyes were dark with desire.

"I shall not force you again, my sweet, but I should very much like to begin teaching you about pleasure," he said, and Rìona knew it was as close as he could bring himself to making a request, for the king had no experience with being denied. "Anora is a capable queen, but her cold bed and colder eyes do not hold the appeal for me they once did when I was young and besotted by her beauty. I want things to be different with you. I spoke truly last night; I am a good lover, when I'm not behaving like an ogre. Am I mistaken in thinking that it was not a lack of desire that motivated your refusal?"

Rìona let herself blush, ducking her head, even as she felt the tight warmth of arousal begin to spread through her. "I... scarcely know how to answer that, Your—Cailan. You will think me immodest."

Cailan's fingertips stroked lightly down the side of her neck and Rìona's eyes drifted shut, a soft, enraptured sigh trickling from her lips. "I've seen your modesty, and it's becoming," the king murmured. "Now I would taste your passion."

She made no protest as he unbuckled her cuirass and quickly divested her of her armor and accoutrements. Freed from the need to resist, Rìona could allow herself to respond to his kisses and caresses, taking care only that she not be too bold or demonstrate too much skill just yet. Cailan hadn't lied; he _was_ skilled, and it was not necessary to feign pleasure at his touch as he explored and aroused her. He was solicitous of her aches, and genuinely remorseful at the sight of the bruises he'd left on her, particularly the dark ring of finger marks where he'd seized her wrist to force her to drop the dagger.

"I shall treasure them, my king," she said, hastening to reassure him. She reached to rub away the troubled frown that creased his forehead. "For they mean that I am yours."

His eyes were awed as they met hers, and in that moment, Rìona knew she possessed him utterly.

"Are you too tender, dear heart?" he asked as his fingers stroked her carefully. She hissed in discomfort when they slid inside her sex, but shook her head emphatically, too aroused and eager to let her residual aches stop them. He brought her to the brink with expert caresses and only then did he lie back upon the bed and bid her ride him. They moaned together as she took him within her and sank down upon him. The discomfort was acute, but the pleasure was greater. Rìona shifted above him, seeking a slightly better angle, and Cailan's hands found her hips and began to guide her up and down. When his fingers caressed her again, she cried out, her head falling back, her body going taut above him as waves of pleasure crashed over her.

When she looked down again, the king was smiling as though he'd performed an amazing feat. Rìona smiled back and allowed herself to be swept up in pleasure again as he began to move more purposefully, surging up into her as he sought his own release.

It was some time later, after she had washed and as he was helping her back into her armor, that she confessed, "I am concerned about the coming battle, my king."

"Ah, you've never been to war before, have you, dear heart?" the king asked with sympathy, assisting her with buckling her vambraces. "Well, there is little to fear. We have been victorious in every battle thus far."

"I am no coward," she stated, "but the Warden-Commander worries that we are greatly outnumbered, and he is more knowledgeable about darkspawn than anyone else. Surely if he is concerned, then we ought to be as well."

"Duncan frets too much. With you and the Grey Wardens at my side, we cannot fail!"

"Perhaps," Rìona said doubtfully, giving him a worried smile and placing a hand intimately above his heart. "It's only... having just found you, my king, I should be loathe to risk losing you so soon. And there is little glory to be had if we go into battle unprepared and fail."

Cailan lifted her hand from his chest and kissed it ardently. "What would Duncan have me do?"

"He has said that our chances would be better if we were to fall back and wait for reinforcements from Redcliffe and the Grey Wardens from Orlais before engaging the darkspawn horde."

The king frowned, clearly displeased by that prospect. "I suppose you have a point," he said reluctantly. "And I wouldn't care to take any unnecessary risks with your safety. I would hardly be a wise king to completely disregard the advice of my Warden-Commander. Hmm. Well, you may tell Duncan I will consider the idea and discuss it with my general, though I make no promises just yet."

Rìona smiled and rose up to kiss him. "I think that a wise decision," she said, and he beamed at her approval. Cailan pulled her close for a last passionate kiss then bade her leave before he forgot his responsibilities and spent the whole day betwixt her thighs.

As she walked away from his tent, she uneasily pondered the simplicity with which all her objectives had been met, mistrusting the ease with which it had been accomplished. She was not paying attention to her surroundings when an armored hand seized her arm and hauled her about to face a massive, dark-haired man.

"Do you think I don't know what you're up to?" Teyrn Loghain sneered, his gauntlet bruising her arm. Though she struggled, his grip was unbreakable.

"What is the meaning of this?" she demanded angrily, arrogance the only weapon left to her. "You may be the king's father-in-law, ser, but I am your equal and you have no right nor authority to manhandle me!"

"That is where you are wrong," the teyrn said coldly. "As general of the royal army, I also oversee Ferelden's intelligence operations. That means it's my job to deal with spies and conspirators."

"Spies? Conspirators? Are you mad?" Rìona asked incredulously.

"Cailan may be ignorant about the Couslands, but I am not," Loghain stated bluntly. "Your mother was a common whore, your father little better than a pimp. It's said the lot of you fuck each other when no one else is available."

Rìona stared at him in shock, forgetting even to struggle. How had he learned about her mother? Her parents had erased every link to Teyrna Cousland's past after the teyrn had wed her.

"Rumors are not necessarily facts, ser," she finally found the presence of mind to answer. "Surely you, as liege of the only other teyrnir in Ferelden, are intimately aware of just how vicious gossip can be."

"Your father was a great _friend_ to the Orlesians," Loghain continued, as though she hadn't spoken.

"My father was as true a Fereldan as ever existed!"

"Duncan brought you here to seduce the king."

"The Warden-Commander is far too concerned about the Blight to be bothered with whom the king happens to bed."

"Not if it means convincing Cailan to disregard the advice of his councilors and allow chevaliers to cross our borders."

Were she not so alarmed, Rìona would have sagged in relief. The king's father-in-law only suspected part of her objective.

She forced a note of scorn into her voice. "I have no time to listen to paranoid theories."

"You don't deny you're crawling into his bed." His disdain was nearly palpable.

"I don't trouble myself to deny accusations that have no business being made in the first place."

"If I were to shove my hand between your thighs right now it would come away sopping with his spunk!"

Rìona took a deep breath and forced herself to cold contempt, ignoring the spark of excitement his revulsion ignited within her. He was disgusted by her and perversely, it made her rouse to him.

"Your vulgarity aside, I should think you would have a hard time explaining to the king precisely why you are assaulting a Grey Warden recruit—not to mention a fellow noblewoman—not twenty yards from his tent," she replied, lifting her chin.

Growling in frustration, Loghain pushed her away roughly, causing her to stumble. Catching herself against the bole of a tree, Rìona rubbed her upper arm where his gauntlet had bruised her.

She would never know what reckless demon fueled her next rash declaration.

"I shall forgive your boorish manners this one time only, Teyrn Loghain," she declared arrogantly. "But I'd advise you not to make an enemy of me. My vendetta against Arl Howe is not so consuming that I can't find room to add another name to the list of those from whom I fully intend to seek redress. The day may come when you find yourself reliant upon my mercy."

Hatred and loathing burned in Loghain's eyes as she gave him one last contemptuous glare and walked away. Only once she was out of sight of his tent did she allow herself to sag weakly against a marbled column and cover her face with shaking hands. She brushed away frustrated and frightened tears, slowly composing herself before making her way to Duncan to tell him the most recent developments.


	6. Chapter Six: Bitter Duty

Everything was falling together perfectly.

So why did she feel as though it was all coming apart?

That was the question Rìona found herself asking repeatedly as she and Alistair and the two other Grey Warden recruits made their way into the Korcari Wilds on a mission to retrieve darkspawn blood in preparation for their Joining. Despite the nearly flawless execution of her plan thus far, she felt as though she was poised upon a dangerous precipice, a single, careless misstep from a catastrophic fall. It should have made her cautious, but instead it drove her to recklessness. That fear, that uncertainty, was in its own way marvelous. She had wanted to feel, and now she did. Her heart raced non-stop and her gut clenched with a tense, thrilling sense of foreboding that was strangely akin to arousal.

She was unable to sleep that night in the Wilds, lying on her bedroll beside the small campfire they had built. A few feet away, Alistair's breathing was slow and even, stopping just short of being a snore. The same could not be said of Ser Jory, who was supposed to be keeping first watch with the cut-purse recruit Daveth. Her efforts to sleep were frustrated by the anxious rushing of her own pulse and the knight's rumbling snores. She turned restlessly upon her bedroll and found herself staring into Daveth's watching eyes.

It was madness, that urge to test her newfound lack of restraint. And yet that did not stop her from deliberately holding his gaze as she rose from her bedroll and walked into the trees, knowing he would follow.

With the Wilds filled with darkspawn, they could not go far from camp, and so instead they had to be silent, the only sound the soft, vulgar slap of his hips against hers and the scraping of her back against the bark of a tree. No sooner had the shudders of her own climax faded and Daveth's harsh panting in her ear grown ragged then she forced herself to push him away and took him into her mouth, tasting his salty release upon her tongue as a precaution against conceiving his child.

It was madness, an unnecessary risk with no possibility of worthwhile reward. And yet it was the only thing that soothed her anxious unrest. She did not speak to the pickpocket as she gathered up her discarded smallclothes and returned to her bedroll, nor acknowledge him again. Thankfully, he did not seem inclined to press the matter and returned to his post, thumping Ser Jory awake once Rìona was settled upon her bedroll again.

As she lay there trying to sleep, she heard Loghain's sneering voice accuse her of practicing a whore's arts, but it did not shame her. Rather, it made her feel fantastically alive. If she was a whore, so be it. She was who she had been raised to be, and she would not dishonor the teachings of her parents nor the memory of her mother by being anything other.

That echo of Loghain's voice followed her through the next day as they encountered a strange apostate mage called Morrigan and her crazed mother. The knowing look in Morrigan's bizarre yellow eyes as she glanced from Rìona to Daveth made it clear that she knew, or at least suspected, what had passed between them. The hedge witch made no mention of it, however, as she took them back to her mother's crude hut to retrieve the treaties they'd been sent to recover—in addition to vials of darkspawn blood—from an abandoned Grey Warden outpost. Instead, she favored Rìona with a glance that was somehow less disdainful than the regard she turned upon Alistair, Daveth and Jory. In that look was an odd sort of familiarity, almost admiration or kinship. Rìona wondered what it meant, but before she could find a way to inquire, the witch had escorted them out of the Wilds until they were able to find their way back to Ostagar.

The army encampment was buzzing with activity when they returned. It was a vast difference from the watchful anticipation that had pervaded the camp the previous day when they had departed for the Wilds.

"Something's happened," Alistair said, picking up his pace as they wound their way through the maze of tents to the ruins of the fortress. There, the increased activity was more restrained, but still discernible as squires and messengers bustled about madly. They found Duncan by the large large bonfire in the center of the ruins, where he stood watching the activity with a look of satisfaction.

"What's happening?" Alistair asked as they approached, but it was to Rìona that Duncan addressed himself.

"The king has decided to pull the army back to Redcliffe and call for reinforcements from Orlais," he said, relief heavy in his voice. "We decamp at first light tomorrow."

"Oh, thank the Maker!" Alistair breathed, giving voice to Rìona's own relief. She met Duncan's eyes, and he gave her a small smile and a nod of approval. Seeing that smile, the obvious lessening of his burden, she felt all she had done to be well worth the effort. What she had accomplished was a marvelous thing, she thought with pride, not merely for her own sake but for all of them.

"You'll have the afternoon to make ready for the journey tomorrow," Duncan informed them. "Meanwhile, the mages will prepare for your Joining. We will conduct the ritual before the supper hour. Until then, you are all at your leisure. Rìona, stay a moment."

Alistair and the others departed, and Duncan waited until they were out of hearing before speaking to her. "The king came by earlier asking when you would be returning from the Wilds."

There was something troubling him when he looked at her, but he did not say more. "Very well, I shall go to him," she answered with a nod.

"You should know that what you have accomplished may very well save Ferelden," Duncan told her. "Thank you."

Unsure just how to respond to his grave gratitude, Rìona nodded again and walked away. She did not go immediately to Cailan, but first returned to her tent to wash the dirt of her travels from her body. She sent her armor off with one of the squires that served the Grey Wardens to be cleaned and oiled and made her way to the king's tent in her linen undershirt and a pair of patched linen breeches she'd been able to acquire from the quartermaster. No noblewoman's garments, these, she thought with a rueful smile. Perhaps once they reached Redcliffe she might be able to acquire a slightly more fitting wardrobe with which to please the king's eye.

Elric Maraigne was on guard duty outside Cailan's tent, grimacing at the raised voices within.

"...fool notion that we need the Orlesians to defend ourselves!" she heard Loghain shout.

"It is not a fool notion," Cailan answered almost calmly as Elric lifted the tent flap to allow Rìona to enter. He sounded far more controlled and regal than she'd ever heard him. "Our arguments with the Orlesians are a thing of the past. I will not waste the lives of Fereldan troops just to satisfy your prejudice. And _you_ will remember who is king."

She hesitated outside the tent, wondering if it was wise to simply walk in and give Loghain more fodder for his suspicions. Were they still attempting to be discreet? Clearly not, if Cailan had instructed his guard to give her unrestricted access.

Blast it all, anyway, she thought, setting her shoulders. Loghain would learn sooner or later than Cailan intended to set Loghain's daughter aside and wed Rìona instead. It may as well be sooner.

"How fortunate Maric did not live to see his son ready to hand Ferelden over to those who enslaved us for a century!" Loghain taunted as Rìona stepped inside the tent.

The argument came to a sudden halt and the look Loghain turned upon Rìona as she entered was absolutely murderous. Her chest tightened with fear, but she stood her ground. She was to be queen; she would not cower before this paranoid, half-mad veteran, no matter how imposing his presence.

"You have preparations to make to decamp the royal army, General Loghain," Cailan said with cool, arrogant formality. "I suggest you be about them. You may go."

The teyrn snarled with fury as he stormed rudely past Rìona and out of the king's pavilion. Cailan watched him, shaking his head regretfully, then turned his attention to Rìona.

"Dear heart!" he stepped forward to clasp her hands in his, pressing a kiss to each in turn. "I'm so very relieved to see you back safely. I was beside myself when I found Duncan had sent you into the Korcari Wilds."

"I am to be a Grey Warden, my king," she reminded him. "The Warden-Commander cannot swaddle me in lamb's wool, even for your peace of mind."

"I know," Cailan replied. "And it's thrilling to think that I shall be wed to one of the legendary Grey Wardens!"

Rìona smiled indulgently at him, and Cailan swept her toward his bed, stripping off her breeches and smallclothes in a frenzied haste and spreading her upon the bed to pleasure her enthusiastically with his lips and tongue. Rìona's fingers threaded through the golden silk of his hair as she shuddered and moaned her rapture beneath him. The king's smile was satisfied as he rose up above her and she tasted herself upon his lips as her knees embraced his hips.

The afternoon was aging when Rìona dressed again, feeling an unaccustomed sense of contentment. The king might be an easily-led fool, but he would at least be a thoroughly pleasant bedmate, and so long as _she_ was the one doing the leading, his foolishness and adolescent infatuation with her could only be to her benefit. For the first time in weeks, she felt satisfied with the way everything was progressing, free from the uneasy restlessness that had plagued her, especially since her arrival at Ostagar.

Cailan still lay upon his bed, watching her dress, and Rìona approached to bestow an affectionate kiss upon him. "I want to thank you, my king. I think it a very wise choice to pull the armies back and call for reinforcements."

He preened under her praise. "I'm glad you approve, dear heart," he sighed. "I'm also glad you returned from your mission when you did. We might have moved the army out today, had I not held off to give you time to get back from the Wilds. I could not bear to leave you behind."

Rìona pulled away from him, the color slowly bleeding from her face as a dreadful fear began to arise. "What of the scouting parties?" she asked. "Have they all returned?"

Cailan's expression grew somber. "No. Some of them weren't due to return for days yet. I'm afraid we will have to leave them behind and pray for the Maker's mercy, that they may find their way out of the Wilds on their own."

Rìona stared at him in horror. "But... my brother is out there! We cannot just abandon him. He's the Teyrn of Highever. Surely if we could delay for my return, we can wait for him!"

"I'm sorry, my sweet," the king said regretfully. "Had you not returned today, I could not have delayed any longer, even for you. The last report from our scouts had the darkspawn horde arriving by tomorrow night or the next day at the latest, and they travel faster than we do. Any further delay and we would have been caught out in the open, unable to avoid battle and lacking the defensive advantage Ostagar provides us."

There was a instant when she thought she might actually faint, a strange buzzing in her head as she groped desperately to find some flaw in his reasoning that she could exploit. But there was none, and finally she whispered, "I beg your leave, Your Majesty. I must report to Duncan."

She did not wait for his dismissal as was proper, but bolted from his tent and dashed through the ruins to the bonfire where last she had seen Duncan. He was not there, and so she hurried to the Grey Warden enclave of the encampment. It was there she found him, moving among the tents, inquiring about the state of readiness of his Wardens. A single look at Rìona's pale, desperate expression, however, and he dismissed the Grey Warden he was speaking to—whose name she had not yet learned—and gestured for her to proceed him into his tent.

"Duncan, what have you made me do?" she demanded, tears burning her eyes.

He looked at her steadily. "What we have to do, to save Ferelden."

"Fergus is still out there!" She gestured toward the Wilds, a sweeping, encompassing motion. "We're going to abandon him, and it was _you_ who bade me convince the king to do it!"

He did not reply and after a moment, Rìona approached him, reached out to him, touching his bearded face. "Please, Duncan, I beg you. In the name of my mother and father, find some way to put a halt to this."

"I'm sorry." Still he continued to stare at her, unmoving and unmoved, and her hand fell away. "The only consolation I can offer you is that his sacrifice will save untold thousands. With reinforcements from Orlais, we can stop the Blight here, before it spreads across Ferelden, across all of Thedas."

Understanding came upon her, cold and brutal. "You knew," she whispered, horrified. "Since the moment we learned Fergus was out scouting in the Wilds, you knew it would come to this."

Duncan bowed his head at that, his shoulders drooping ever so slightly as he nodded. "Yes."

"You've shared Fergus's bed, made love to both him and Oriana. How can you stand there, unaffected, as though he means nothing, after all the losses my family has already suffered? How can you do this to him?"

"I do what I must."

She continued to watch him, but Duncan offered no further explanation or justification. How could he be so untouched by what he had done? Was this what it meant to be a Grey Warden? she wondered. Was this what it did to you?

Finally Duncan straightened and spoke. "You'd best go prepare yourself for your Joining," he said calmly, gesturing to her shirt and breeches.

"No." The refusal was out of her mouth before she even knew she intended to make it. "If this is what it is to be a Grey Warden, then I refuse."

"You are not a volunteer," he said, and there was something hard and merciless in his voice. "You may have been recruited, but do not think that gives you any more right to refuse than if you had been conscripted."

"You cannot force me to go through with this! I shall go to the king—"

"And tell him what?" Duncan stalked toward her and there was anger and aggression beneath that controlled facade. "That you seduced him at my behest? Or that you'd been planning to seduce him for years to advance your family? Even if he was moved to intervene after you made such a confession, there is nothing he can do. King Maric himself confirmed the Right of Conscription during a Blight. You will undergo the Joining. Go make ready."

Her fingers felt numb as she left Duncan's tent, scarcely able to grasp the canvas flap to push it back. Her armor had been delivered, cleaned and polished, to her tent while she had dallied with Cailan, and one of the squires appeared unbidden to help her don it. An unnaturally early dusk was beginning to darken the overcast sky as she made her way to the ruined temple where Alistair awaited with Daveth and an increasingly anxious Ser Jory. The knight was having second thoughts about the Joining, particularly since Duncan had revealed to them that it was dangerous, possibly even deadly.

Rìona looked at the large silver chalice on the altar warily, realizing it must contain the tainted darkspawn blood they'd been sent into the Wilds to gather. The blood everyone said was poisonous, killing soldiers and mabari alike. Now she understood what Duncan intended for them.

Her sympathies were with Jory, married only a year and his wife heavy with child, and yet his incessant worrying wearied and irritated her. He was not the only one trapped, not the only one left with no other choice. Daveth's bravado was hardly better, and she snapped at them both to be silent as she waited tensely for Duncan's arrival.

She had come so far, done so much. Was it all to end here? Would she be the last of the Couslands to fall? Why had Duncan bothered to save her when Highever was overtaken if this was to be her fate?

Unfortunately, she knew why.

When Duncan appeared to conduct the ritual, she did not argue against it, though she felt sick and betrayed. Alistair spoke a brief and solemn invocation, but it was Duncan to whom her eyes traveled.

_Join us, brothers and sisters._

The irony threatened to choke her. All these weeks, she'd felt as though Duncan was her remaining family, but even in his most ambitious schemes, her father would never had used her the ruthless way Duncan had. Was this the supposed fraternity offered by the Grey Wardens, to discard those they cared for so casually?

_Join us in the shadows where we stand, vigilant. Join us as we carry the duty that cannot be foresworn._

She had stood in no shadows. No vigilance had she maintained. No, her duty was merely to spread herself upon the king's bed at Duncan's bidding and be the instrument of her brother's abandonment to near-certain death.

_And should you perish, know that your sacrifice will not be forgotten, and that one day we shall join you._

Her sacrifice. Rìona wanted to weep. How she wished it had only been her death Duncan had required of her.

"Daveth, step forward," Duncan commanded with that terrible, solemn calm. The cut-purse did as he was bidden, and raised the chalice to his lips. Rìona watched, horrified, as he began choking and convulsing, falling to the ground. He screamed in agony. Daveth, who just last night had pleasured her against a tree in the Wilds, died at her feet.

"I am sorry, Daveth." Duncan murmured and stepped past his body before he'd even stopped moving.

It was almost inevitable that Ser Jory should panic after watching Daveth die.

"I have a wife, a child!" the knight protested, backing away and drawing his sword. "There is no glory in this!"

She had not imagined her horror could get any more acute, but the nearly casual ease with which Duncan parried the strike of Jory's greatsword with nothing but a dagger accomplished the deed. Duncan murmured another apology, and then there were two bodies at her feet, and a spreading pool of blood.

She had no hope of escape.

"You are called upon to submit yourself to the taint for the greater good," Duncan intoned with that terrible, implacable determination, approaching her with the chalice. Her hands shook as she took it and raised it to her lips.

"From this moment forth, you are a Grey Warden," she heard Duncan say. And then the world descended into chaos and pain and images out of a nightmare. 

* * *

She awoke with Duncan and Alistair hovering over her, and realized they had brought her back to her tent. Her head ached abominably and she felt sick to her stomach. Alistair breathed an obvious sigh of relief as she regained consciousness.

"Two more deaths," he said mournfully. "Only one died at my Joining, but it was... horrible. I'm glad at least one of you made it through."

"How are you feeling?" Duncan asked, offering her a hand to help her rise from her bedroll. Rìona disdained it and pushed herself up, though her limbs were shaky.

"I'm fine," she muttered ungraciously. "Alistair, may I have a moment to speak with Duncan alone?"

"Of course," he said, nodding. "I'll go prepare to break camp tomorrow."

As Alistair ducked out of the tent, she stared at Duncan with utter loathing. "You delayed the Joining so that if I died, I would have at least first have succeeded in seducing Cailan and convincing him to pull the army back," she accused.

"Yes." Again, that calm, remorseless voice. "You have to understand. The Grey Wardens do what they must to end the Blight. That requirement demands sacrifices from us all. Thankfully you stand here as proof that they are not made in vain."

She hated herself for the tears that rose to her eyes and spilled down her cheeks. "My family cared for you, loved you even. We took you in among us and treated you as one of our own."

"Yes."

"You've betrayed us all. Mother. Father. Fergus. Even me. There's not one of us you haven't used."

"I'm sorry," Duncan said simply, no inflection in his tone. His eyes were dark and shuttered, his face expressionless. She may as well have been talking to one of the Tranquil.

"Maker piss on your apologies!" she spat, striking him across the face. Her loathing was so intense she thought she might vomit. "I despise you."

Duncan turned to walk from the tent, something heavy and defeated in the set of his shoulders, but then he spun back to Rìona and grabbed her by the arms, kissing her brutally. All the the rage, the remorse, the fear and desperation he wouldn't let himself speak of was there in that kiss. She felt it in the tremor of his body, heard it in the growl in his throat. She sobbed against his mouth and opened to his thrusting tongue, more tears streaming down her face despite the way her arms wound about his neck.

Even now, after all he had done, he was still the only person she had left to remind her of home.

Duncan released her as suddenly as he had seized her and Rìona staggered away from him, clutching a shaking hand to her mouth.

It was little consolation that it took Duncan a moment to compose himself.

"I'm sorry," he said again, tonelessly. He lifted the tent flap to leave and suddenly Rìona became aware of voices shouting outside the tent, all through the encampment.

"Duncan!" Alistair yelled, sprinting toward the tent as Rìona followed Duncan out. "We just received word from one of the few scouting parties to make it back alive. The darkspawn horde has moved faster than we anticipated. There's no time to fall back to Redcliffe. They'll be here before midnight!"

"Maker help us all," Duncan practically moaned. "I must go to the king. Alistair, tell the Grey Wardens I've ordered them to make ready for battle. Rìona, come with me."

They found Cailan holding a war council with Loghain, the Revered Mother and the senior mage present at Ostagar. Loghain and the king were arguing furiously.

"How were we caught out like this? Why did your scouts not report this sooner?" Cailan demanded.

"Too many of the scouting parties have been overtaken and killed," Loghain replied. "Had even one made it back earlier, we might have known about this. It doesn't matter, we are as ready to face them today as we would have been had they arrived tomorrow as we expected."

"If I had not listened to your counsel, Loghain, we might have had more reinforcements than we could possibly need by now!" the king shouted. "You have weakened us to placate your own paranoia and the losses we suffer here tonight will be on _your_ head!"

"Just a few days ago you were confident our current forces would suffice," Loghain shot back. "It is your infatuation with the Grey Wardens which will be the ruin of us all!"

"Duncan! Are your Wardens ready for battle?"

"They are, Your Majesty."

"And what of you, Lady Cousland? Congratulations are in order, I understand? Your Joining was a success?" Cailan's eyes were anxious and concerned as they sought hers, and Loghain shot her a look of complete loathing.

"Yes, Your Majesty," she murmured, miserable at the idea that she would never be able to tell him—or anyone, really—how unworthy of congratulations she felt. "Thank you."

"Are we to discuss strategy here," Loghain demanded angrily, "or are we simply going to listen to another endless round of talk about glory and legends?"

"Fine, then, speak your strategy," Cailan snapped at his general. "But understand I will be standing beside the Grey Wardens in this battle. My decision is final."

"Your fascination with these Grey Wardens will be your undoing," Lohgain vowed, unrolling a map. Cailan and he bent over it and discussed their plan, which would involve splitting their forces between the Grey Wardens and the royal army on the field of battle. Meanwhile, Loghain's troops would lie in wait for a pre-arranged signal, to flank the darkspawn horde and catch them between the two armies.

"Then who shall light this beacon?" Cailan asked, referring to the signal to be set from the top of the Tower of Ishal in the Ostagar ruins.

"I have a few men stationed there," Loghain said, his anger suddenly absent in a way Rìona found disconcerting as he unexpectedly offered more aid than the king had requested. Perhaps, she mused, Loghain did not think very highly of their chances, either. "It's not a dangerous task, but it _is_ vital."

"Then we should send our best," Cailan declared, stepping back away from the map. "Send Alistair and the new Grey Warden to light the beacon."

Cailan looked over at Rìona with solemn eyes, and she realized he was afraid. She'd managed to impress upon him how desperately they were outnumbered, but all too late. If he hadn't delayed to wait for her, he might have gotten the army out in time. But they'd had no way of knowing the darkspawn horde would be here so soon.

He was afraid, and he was buying himself a bit of reassurance by attempting to keep her safe. She supposed she ought to be insulted at being excluded from the battle, and some wild, desperate part of her wanted to be out there on the field, meeting death with so many others from Highever. But she knew it was not for her combat prowess that Duncan had recruited her. She was capable enough with her bow, but if she could be better utilized elsewhere, it was no doubt for the best.

Just as quickly as it had disappeared, Teyrn Loghain's rage was back, mottling his face as he glared at Rìona again while she softly vowed to do her best at her appointed task. "You rely on these Grey Wardens too much!" Loghain protested. "Is that truly wise?"

"Enough of your conspiracy theories, Loghain!" the king commanded, banging his fist on the rough wooden table beside the map. "Grey Wardens battle the Blight, no matter where they're from."

There was more discussion about what might happen should the archdemon appear, and whether the mages might be better candidates to light the beacon in the Tower of Ishal. But in the end, it mattered little. Cailan had decided his moment of glory was at hand, standing beside the Grey Wardens against the overwhelming horde approaching.

"Yes, Cailan," Loghain muttered in disgust, turning to walk away. "A glorious moment for us all."

The king left them, then, meeting Rìona's eyes one last time, making it obvious he wished for her to come to him again before the battle. She dropped her eyes and nodded, unable to think of anything she wished to do less and also realizing that she was now trapped in the role she had created for herself with Duncan's help. Unless she could find some way to break Cailan's infatuation with her, she would be stuck with him, fool that he was, for life.

She followed Duncan to meet with Alistair and convey to him the plan for the battle, and he was predictably affronted at being kept out of the fight. She stood by without comment as he argued the matter with Duncan, and finally Duncan dismissed them, leaving to join the other Grey Wardens in preparation for battle.

"The king wished to speak with me before the battle," she muttered to Alistair, excusing herself. Alistair frowned and looked as though he might question why Cailan should want to speak with her, but she walked away before he could put any of his questions to words.

Cailan was waiting for her, his eyes fever-bright and his body quivering with the tight, coiled tension of battle-readiness. When he kissed her, his mouth held the bitter tang of copper coins, telling of the mad rush of anticipation and nerves. He'd removed the bare minimum of his armor necessary to couple with her, and he shoved her roughly down onto the rug covering the ground within his tent. His hands worked frantically beneath her war skirt to free her of her leather loin covering and smallclothes.

She did not want him, she realized even as her pulse quickened and her sex grew slick and moist at his touch. All those years of waiting, and now she did not want the prize she had won. Bitter, bitter irony. No matter how skillfully he could arouse her, she did not want the man he was.

And yet being with Cailan was now familiar. _Passion_ was safe and familiar, the only thing she was sure of anymore. It was comforting and gave her something to cling to in the storm of uncertainty raging within and without. After Duncan's betrayal, it was all she had left to her.

He was not gentle as he drove into her with a savagery that made their first coupling seem tender in comparison. His armor gouged her and left bruises, yet as she caught his urgency, she yearned for it, begged for it, clinging to him. The touch of his fingers working her toward a devastating climax was almost perfunctory. His mind was not upon her at all, she understood, but upon the battle to come as he thrust toward his own completion.

He left her there upon that rug, shivering once he withdrew from her. His face was cold and distant as he righted his clothing and replaced the missing pieces of his armor. He was ready to fight, perhaps even ready to die. He had no room for tenderness even if she had craved it, which she did not. Cailan stared at her as he would a stranger as she lay panting there upon the rug, and then he left without a word.

It would be the last time she would see him.


	7. Chapter Seven: Resolutions

She awoke nude on a rough cot, with her head throbbing mercilessly and her shoulder aching from some deep wound she could find no evidence of when she glanced at it.

Healing magic? The Circle mage, perhaps, from the Tower of Ishal? Rìona shook her head in confusion, trying to recall what had happened after they had killed the ogre and lit the signal beacon. Had there been another wave of darkspawn, trapping them in the open atop the tower? And then—

"Ah, your eyes finally open. Mother shall be pleased."

That elegant, disdainful voice was familiar. Rìona blinked bleary eyes and the form of a beautiful, dark-haired woman swam into view. "I remember you," she croaked, and a gourd of water was thrust into her hands. Rìona drank deeply, struggling to make some sense of her situation. She did not recognize the room she was in, with its rough-hewn wooden walls dabbed with mud to fill the cracks and chinks. The fire on the hearth failed to drive out the chill entirely, but something fragrant simmered in a large pot over it and Rìona found that she was ravenous, a sensation ridiculously at odds with the nausea the horrid aching in her head was causing.

"I am Morrigan, if you don't recall," the woman finally said, and Rìona nodded carefully in deference to her tender head.

"I do," she said again. "But where are we? The last thing I remember was being overwhelmed by darkspawn."

"Mother saved you. She rescued you from atop the tower and brought you here to heal your wounds," Morrigan explained.

"What about—" Rìona paused, swallowing hard against a wave of sickening dizziness. "What about the king, the other Grey Wardens?"

"All dead," Morrigan answered impassively, turning away to stir whatever was cooking over the fire.

"Maker's blood, no!" Rìona gasped. "What happened?"

"The man who was to respond to your signal quit the field, leaving those fighting the darkspawn in the valley to be massacred. Your... friend is not taking it well."

"Alistair is alive?"

"Your fellow Grey Warden, the childish, blubbering one?" Morrigan asked. "Yes, he lives. Mother saved you both, though I do not understand her reasons. Your king would have fetched a much better ransom."

Rìona cast a baleful eye at the witch, taking in her scant garb, barely worthy of being called a shirt or robe. "Have an overdue account with your seamstress, do you?"

"A ransom need not be paid in coin," Morrigan bristled. "Power is much more useful."

Rìona shook her head, her anger abandoning her as she struggled to push herself up from the cot and gather her clothing and armor. "Why would Loghain do such a thing?"

The witch stared at her blankly. "I do not know who this Loghain is."

"And yet you know so much else," Rìona challenged.

"I had an excellent view of the valley during the battle, and for what followed afterward. I saw enough to understand what had transpired, if not to become familiar with the people involved or their motivations."

"Were there any survivors?"

"A few stragglers here and there, though I will be greatly surprised if they manage to make it out of the Wilds before the darkspawn overtake them. As for the rest, well, you don't want to know their fate."

Recalling the monstrous appearance of the creatures she had battled, Rìona knew the witch was correct, though she despised herself for her cowardice for not demanding more information. Morrigan turned her back to Rìona, allowing her the privacy to dress.

As she pulled on her clothing and armor, Rìona recalled Loghain's hate-filled eyes, his mad rage at Cailan's decision to summon aid from the Orlesians, the loathing he'd demonstrated when the king's preferential treatment of Rìona had all but confirmed his suspicions about her having seduced Loghain's own daughter's husband. She sat down abruptly upon the cot.

"This is my doing," she whispered.

Morrigan arched a brow at her. "Are you going to begin blubbering, as well?" she asked scathingly. "Those who died may have been your friends, but I hardly think they would approve of the way your fellow Grey Warden has been carrying on. 'Tis certainly not the way of the Grey Wardens of legend."

Her friends? Fergus, her beloved older brother, whom she could not dare hope had survived when an entire army had perished. Cailan, vainglorious and insipid, whose passionate caresses had moved her nonetheless. Duncan, cold, pragmatic, unknowable, who had used her so ruthlessly. To say nothing of the hundreds of soldiers from Highever, many of whom she had trained beside.

"They were not friends," she muttered. _Friends_ was far too anemic a word to describe the complex, tangled interweave of associations that were now a shattered ruin.

She heard a bark outside the door and realized that Conall had survived. She was not entirely alone! She hastened in struggling lace on her pauldrons and buckle her vambraces only to be stopped by Morrigan, who approached her with a steaming clay cup.

"'Tis a healing tea," she explained, offering it. "Mother bade you drink it, 'twill help with the lingering aches."

The witch quickly turned her back to Rìona and left the hut. Rìona carefully sniffed the contents of the cup, puzzled by Morrigan's sudden unwillingness to meet her eyes when she had offered it. She wasn't entirely certain she wanted to sample a potion from the strange witch and her clearly insane mother. The brew smelled bitter, and she rather thought she would prefer to take her chances with the monstrous headache throbbing in her temples than test the Maker's forbearance drinking it on an empty and still-queasy stomach.

With Morrigan absent, it was a simple matter to empty the contents of the cup onto the fire, where they sizzled and steamed briefly with a pungent odor, and quickly leave the hut before she returned. Conall barked joyously as she stepped into the overcast daylight outside the hut and Alistair spun to greet her, relief writ plain on his face.

"You're alive!" he gasped and for a moment Rìona feared he might try to hug her. With his features so strangely similar to Cailan's, she didn't think she could bear that. It was strange to think that the king was gone. He'd been a fool, and in the end she'd realized she did not wish to find herself wed to him, but what had happened between them had left its mark on her, somehow. She couldn't consider his death and feel nothing. "Thank the Maker. I thought for certain you were—"

"I'm fine," she said gently. "Though I understand we have Morrigan's mother to thank for that."

"She saved us," Alistair confirmed.

"'She' is standing right here," the old woman bristled.

Rìona looked at the strange old mage, frowning. "May we know to whom we should address our thanks?"

"The Chasind folk call me Flemeth. You may do the same, if you like."

Alistair gawked at her. "The Flemeth from the legends? The Witch of the Wilds?"

Rìona blinked, stunned. The legends of the great mage Flemeth had originated in Highever, where supposedly she had once been married to a great lord, long before Ferelden was even a country. The tales had all dealt with a seductive beauty, however, not the crone she saw before her now.

"If you are the Flemeth of legend, you must be very... powerful," she said carefully, though the first word that had spring to mind was _old_. She would have to be diplomatic, for it would not do to give offense in case any portion of the tales turned out to be true.

"Certainly, compared to you," the deceptively decrepit-looking mage smirked.

"Why did you save _us?_" Alistair demanded. "If you're so powerful, why not save Duncan? He was the one who knew how to stop the Blight."

Flemeth shook her head, but declined to answer. "I'm sorry for your Duncan, but you haven't the time to grieve. It must come later."

"But they're all _dead_!" Alistair shouted. "Duncan. The Grey Wardens. Even the king!"

Sweet Andraste, _why_ did it hurt so much to hear those words spoken aloud?

Rìona bit her cheek, blinking against the burning in her eyes. "This isn't the time, Alistair," she said, her voice rough.

"No, it's not," Flemeth agreed. "Now is the time to do your duty. For you, as Grey Wardens, that means uniting the lands against the Blight."

Rìona scoffed, her mind treading easily along the familiar and well-worn path of Fereldan politics. "I suspect that's going to be a great deal more difficult that it sounds. If Loghain has done what you've told us he did, Ferelden is going to fall into chaos. The king had no heir, and the queen is the daughter of the man who abandoned him to death."

Alistair growled. "I hate politics," he muttered. "Just tell me we're going to find Loghain and bring him to judgment."

"That, too, may have to wait," Flemeth advised him and Alistair glared at her. "Or is it your intention to forsake your duty to combat the Blight in the interest of vengeance?"

"But _why_ would Loghain do this?" he demanded, and Rìona looked at her feet. How could she ever tell him that it was she who drove Loghain to this madness by her actions with the king?

"That is a good question," the old witch nodded. "Perhaps he thinks the Blight is merely another army, another war. Perhaps he has no appreciation for the true evil behind it."

"The archdemon."

Flemeth nodded again. "An Old God, tainted by the darkspawn, if you believe your legends. Regardless, it is a fearsome and immortal thing."

"Alistair is the real Grey Warden here. I'm just..." Rìona let her voice trail off, unable to complete the sentence. _Duncan's pet whore_, she thought bitterly. Recruited not for her skill in combat, but for her ability to seduce. Little had Duncan known what devastation setting her loose upon the king would wreak.

"You can't back out on me now!" Alistair protested, a desperate note of panic in his voice. "We're the only Grey Wardens left in all of Ferelden, and I'm not—I can't—I won't let Duncan's death be in vain!"

"And what should I do?" Rìona snapped back at him. "I've lost everyone as well, even my brother now. I don't want it to all have been for nothing, but—I'm not the fighter you are, Alistair."

"Duncan wouldn't recruit someone whose skills he wasn't certain of," Alistair argued.

"My _skills_—!" Rìona began heatedly, but Flemeth interrupted.

"Skill at arms, or even with magic, is not the only strength a person may possess," the old witch interjected. "To turn these stupid humans who ignore the Blight's evil from their petty politics and inspire them to face the archdemon, well... that may take some persuading, don't you think? Flemeth may be old, but she once knew a thing or two about how to turn men's minds to her way of thinking."

Rìona shook her head, seeking to deny their words, but Alistair took her by the upper arms, looking at her with fearful, earnest eyes. "Please. I can't do anything on my own."

She stared at him helplessly, at his face so like Cailan's, whose death she had brought about. In the wake of all the destruction she had set loose, what could she possibly contribute to fight the Blight?

And yet... Alistair was right. Duncan had seen something in her, had seen a need that she could fill.

She found herself nodding, looking away from Alistair's pleading eyes. "All right," she sighed. "I'll... do what I can."

"Thank you," he breathed, releasing her arms and stepping back.

Rìona closed her eyes, considering for a moment. "We need to find and kill the archdemon then, correct? That's the driving force behind the Blight?"

"Yes, but... I don't know how. In previous Blights, it's taken the armies of a half-dozen nations to bring it to an end. There's just the two of us."

"All right," she said, taking a strange comfort in looking at the problem analytically. "The other Grey Wardens, then. What do we know about them? Can we contact them?"

"Duncan said the Grey Wardens of Orlais had been called, and the king was sending for them when we were preparing to pull back, but who knows what Loghain is going to do if they try to cross the pass through the Frostback Mountains and enter Ferelden," Alistair answered thoughtfully. "Besides, it's nearly winter. The mountains may be impassible until spring. They might have to come by boat and the Waking Sea is nearly as bad in the middle of winter or so I hear. We... we have to assume they won't arrive in time."

"In time for what?" Rìona asked. "Do we know how fast a Blight spreads?"

Alistair shook his head in puzzlement. "The darkspawn move fast as a horde, as we saw when they arrived before expected at Ostagar. The longer we wait, the worse it's going to get, but I can't really give you a time frame on how long it's going to take to spread all across Ferelden. Months, perhaps. Maybe a year? I don't know."

"Then our job is to convince Loghain to take the Blight seriously."

Alistair shook his head again, this time in denial. "He's too power-hungry. He just betrayed his own king. Do you really think it will matter to him?"

Loghain's mad eyes glared at her in her memory. "Power-hungry, or simply insane?" she asked with a thoughtful frown.

"Maybe both, I don't know," he shrugged. "If Arl Eamon knew what he had done, he'd never stand for it. He'd call for Loghain's execution. There would be civil war."

"The king's uncle?" Rìona stared at him in surprise. "_You_ know the Arl of Redcliffe?"

"Um. In a way, I guess," Alistair said evasively. "My mother was a serving girl in his castle, and he took me in after she died. He raised me, after a fashion."

Rìona hummed thoughtfully. "I've never met the arl, but my father said he was a decent man, respected in the Landsmeet. As the late Queen Rowan's brother, he's as close to the pinnacle of political influence as one can be, at least now that my father is dead."

Alistair's expression brightened with excitement as he suddenly seized upon a plan. "Of course! The arl wasn't at Ostagar, so he still has all his troops. We can go to him for aid!"

Maker help her, she wanted to seize the bright, gleaming thread of hope running through his words, lending eagerness to his tone, but she simply felt tired and confused. It felt as though her sorrow and regrets were weighing down her limbs, making even the words she spoke come with an unaccustomed effort. Nonetheless, somehow she found herself agreeing to attempt to gather an army. The treaties they had been sent into the Wilds to claim before her joining gave the Grey Wardens the right to call for aid in the event of a Blight from the mages of the Circle of Magi, from the dwarves of Orzammar, even from the elusive Dalish elves.

"It may not be a half-dozen nations, but it certainly sounds like an army to me," Flemeth said smugly.

Alistair's golden eyes positively glowed. "Then we can do this?"

Rìona shrugged helplessly, unable to deny the appeal in his avid gaze. "We're the last Grey Wardens, are we not? Maker help us."

He looked hurt and confused by her lack of enthusiasm, and she immediately felt contrite. "I'm sorry, Alistair. This just— never mind. We'll do it. It's going to take me some time. But we'll do it," she promised with a halfhearted smile of encouragement.

The smile did not linger long as Flemeth announced her intention to send Morrigan to accompany them. The dark-haired mage argued adamantly against going, and Rìona was scarcely more pleased with the idea, even if her magic would prove useful in their endeavors. Alistair's strained expression spoke of his own displeasure at the thought, but she found her position changing when he introduced his argument.

"We have enough problems without inviting trouble from the Chantry for keeping company with an apostate!" he declared.

How had she let herself forget her fellow Grey Warden was once a templar? She wondered how much of the Chantry's doctrine he still clung to. Bad enough to introduce a unsanctioned mage into their efforts when her only other companion was trained to hunt and subdue such mages, but what would he think of Rìona's own... unique set of skills and perspective, if he should happen to find out about it?

Maker's breath, but this was a mad endeavor. She ought to scurry as fast as she could for the Coastlands and book passage to Rivain or someplace someplace well beyond the reach of the Blight. And yet...

_Do your duty, daughter. Make us proud._

"It was illegal magic which saved us," she reminded Alistair, frowning at him when he would have continued to protest. "Sanctioned by the Chantry or not, Morrigan's magic may turn out to be useful. We haven't so many allies that we can afford to turn down help when it is offered."

"Thank you ever so much," Morrigan muttered resentfully. "I suppose I'll go gather my things."

After a bit more discussion, it was decided they would travel north to a village called Lothering, which was something of a crossroads along the Imperial highway. There they could hear the latest news and replenish their scant supplies. Rìona had not possessed much to lose as a result of their inability to return to the encampment at Ostagar, but Alistair had lost all but the armor and weapons he wore. They hadn't even bedrolls to sleep upon, nor changes for the clothing they wore under their armor.

Gratefully she touched the hilt of the Cousland family sword where it rode upon her back. She didn't know what prescience had convinced her to bear its unnecessary weight when they went into the Tower of Ishal, but had she not done so it, too, would have been lost.

Money was also going to be a problem, but there was little help for that now. Perhaps they might find some odd jobs in Lothering to help purchase supplies.

Alistair was distracted bundling together what little Flemeth could send along with them when the old witch took Rìona aside.

"Do not undervalue what skills you have," she said, piercing Rìona with her strange reptilian eyes. "For you wield more power than you know."

Rìona frowned, uncomfortable with the witch's presumption. "And what do you know of my skills?"

The mage of legend, crone that she appeared to be, laughed in her half-mad way. "She may not look it now, but Flemeth was once young and beautiful. Men died for her. They even killed for her."

"Men enough have already died and killed by my actions," Rìona muttered bitterly.

Flemeth shook her head. "You cannot know what shadows linger in the hearts of men, or what drives their actions. It is a dangerous art you practice, true, but a powerful one as well. And you will need every weapon you can wield to defeat this Blight."

The old mage left her then to bid Morrigan farewell, and then they were on their way. She had not realized it, but they had been days at Flemeth's hut deep in the Korcari Wilds, recovering from their wounds. Due to their need to progress with caution to avoid the parties of darkspawn roaming the Wilds, it would be many more days until they reached Lothering.

Alistair was quiet as they set out upon their journey under a dismally leaden sky, which even upon such short acquaintance Rìona realized was uncharacteristic for him. He'd been positively chatty on their excursion into the Wilds prior to her Joining. She considered what he had said outside Flemeth's hut about Duncan having been like a father to him. To have lost his mentor and all his comrades... certainly he must be hurting badly. She, of all people, could understand that loss, and yet she found herself unable to reach out to him and offer a sympathetic ear.

She thought less of herself for that inability. Whatever her ambivalence in her feelings toward Duncan at the end, surely she could set it aside enough to offer her one remaining comrade some comfort. Her bitter last words to the man who had been her father's chosen confidante haunted her. It filled her with remorse to know her final words to him had been of hatred when he had in some way become the last of her family. Still, she did not think she could tolerate Alistair eulogizing him. She did not believe the former templar truly knew exactly the sort of man his mentor had been.

But then, did she? Surely her father must have seen _something_ in Duncan that had been worthy of his trust. Had he been mistaken, or was there more to Duncan than the ruthless pragmatism that had been left at the end? She fell asleep still pondering that thought, troubled, and woke hours later thrashing and moaning with the roars of a monstrous-looking dragon echoing in her head.

"Bad dreams?" Alistair's voice reached her from where he sat nearby, keeping his shift at watch by the fire.

"Why do I think you already know the answer to that?" Rìona asked, pushing herself upright. Her skin was chilled from sleeping on the bare ground; they would absolutely have to get blankets for bedrolls when they reached Lothering.

"You had a few in Flemeth's hut when you were unconscious the last couple days, so I've been anticipating having to have this talk with you for a while."

"What talk is that?"

"Duncan didn't really have a chance to tell you much about what to expect after your Joining." Alistair drew a deep, shaky breath, as though struggling with some profound emotion. "So, I, um, guess that job falls to me. You can expect a lot of those sorts of nightmares. It's how we sense the archdemon. We hear him... _talking_ to the horde. That's how we know it's a Blight."

"I saw a... dragon. I think?"

"That's the archdemon," Alistair nodded. "They say the Old Gods were dragons. Big ones. Some of the older Grey Wardens say they can understand him when he speaks, but I can't. I just hear lots of roaring."

"I see. Any other changes I should know of?"

Alistair pursed his lips thoughtfully. "Recovering from a head injury, maybe you haven't noticed, but your appetite will increase."

Her stomach chose that moment to give a decidedly un-genteel gurgle. "That's... lovely," she muttered, looking at the empty pot by the fire. Though Morrigan had laid snares and Conall had gone hunting, they'd had no success in finding any game. The wildlife, Morrigan explained, was migrating out of the Wilds ahead of the Blight. Until they could put more distance between themselves and the darkspawn horde, game would be scarce.

"Don't feel bad," Alistair said encouragingly. "I thought I was starving, too. Back at the Grey Warden compound in Denerim. Took a lot of ribbing about it from the other Grey Wardens, too, though they had all gone through it at one point or another. I guess it's a bit of a rite of passage, making a fool out of yourself wolfing down your food."

"Or it would be, had we any food." Rìona gave him a small smile. Alistair grinned in reply, though it was a shadow of the warm, engaging smile he'd given her a few times before the battle.

"Sorry," he muttered. "This probably isn't what you envisioned when you imagined being a Grey Warden, is it?"

"No," Rìona murmured absently, "not what I envisioned at all." Alistair looked away and an awkward silence fell, until finally Rìona asked, "What of you? Is being a Grey Warden all you dreamed?"

"It's... an honor. A purpose. Doing something important, being a part of an order of peerless warriors. It's certainly better than life as a templar would have been," he snorted, then sobered. "Or at least, I thought it was, until all this happened. I'm sure it still is, I'm just having a hard time remembering how at the moment."

"Being a templar wasn't your heart's desire?"

Alistair shook his head emphatically. "Devotion to the Chantry is all right for some, but I was miserable at the monastery. I'm not very pious, and I didn't fit in well with any of the other templars in training for a multitude of reasons, not the least of which was the fact that I have no father. Compared to a lifetime of enforced chastity and the virtual slavery of lyrium addiction, the nightmares and voracious appetite really aren't that bad."

"Lyrium addiction?"

"Whoops! There I go, blurting out the Chantry's dirty little secrets." The stubborn set of his jaw said he wasn't contrite about his slip in the least. "Yes. When a templar takes his vows, they start giving him lyrium, and he becomes addicted. Supposedly it helps strengthen the talents that enable a templar to track and subdue apostate mages, but seeing as the Chantry controls the lyrium trade, it has the added benefit it putting him directly under the Chantry's thumb for the rest of his life. At least, until the constant lyrium exposure drives him mad, at which point he gets shipped off to Val Royeaux with the other 'retired' templars."

"Maker's blood!" Rìona breathed. "I've never approved of the way the Chantry treats mages like criminals or even dangerous beasts, but I had no idea what they were doing to the templars in the process!"

"Well, _they_ feel perfectly justified about it," Alistair remarked with a shrug. "'Magic exists to serve man, and never to rule over him.' Right?"

"So to avoid the possibility of maleficarim controlling the minds and stealing the free will of innocents with blood magic, instead the Chantry controls the minds and wills of the templars with lyrium." Rìona shook her head. "The irony is staggering. Why didn't you simply refuse to take your vows?"

"It's... not that easy. Coming up on my confirmation as I was, it was certainly something I was considering, but there were... other factors," he said evasively. "I didn't really have much of a choice. Had I refused, I might have found myself thrown in prison for the rest of my life."

"The Chantry can do that?"

"Not the Chantry, though they do take a dim view of those who learn the templar secrets and don't serve, but... Look, it's a long story, and not one I feel like discussing now."

Confused, Rìona shrugged. "As you wish."

"At any rate, in the end it didn't matter. Duncan saved me from that fate. He was the first person to really care about what _I_ wanted."

Rìona shifted uncomfortably, struggling with confusion. How could the man who had rescued Alistair from virtual enslavement by the Chantry be the same man who had betrayed her family's trust as Duncan had?

But then, Duncan's actions toward Alistair hadn't been entirely altruistic either, had they? True, he freed Alistair from a life he was dreading, but in the process, Duncan got a Grey Warden at a time during which he was desperate for more recruits. Would he have troubled himself to risk the Grand Cleric's wrath and conscript Alistair had he not been in such dire need?

And was his need truly that dire, or was Duncan simply that much of a bastard, that he could take advantage of the plight of others to see his own ends met?

"What's going to happen if we don't stop the Blight?" she heard herself asking, desperate to understand what had driven the man her father had called his friend.

Alistair looked troubled. "Ferelden will become a wasteland," he answered. "The darkspawn taint the land as they go. Grass and trees and crops all wither and fail. In the winter that might not be so bad, but come spring, it will start to matter. Those who don't succumb to the corruption will starve for lack of crops. Animals and people touched by the taint die. The ones who die quickly will be the lucky ones, but those who succumb slowly to the corruption, they're far worse. Ghouls, we call them. They're horrible. They turn cannibal, and they're slaves to the will of the archdemon, even lower than the darkspawn. Didn't your tutors teach you any of this?"

"Well, Aldous taught me what was in the Canticle of Threnodies:

_Violently were they cast down,  
For no mortal may walk bodily  
In the realm of dreams,  
Bearing the mark of their Crime:  
Bodies so maimed  
And distorted that none should see them  
And know them for men._

Deep into the earth they fled,  
Away from the Light.  
In Darkness eternal they searched  
For those who had goaded them on,  
Until at last they found their prize,  
Their god, their betrayer:  
The sleeping dragon Dumat. Their taint  
Twisted even the false-god, and the whisperer  
Awoke at last, in pain and horror, and led  
Them to wreak havoc upon all the nations of the world:  
The first Blight."

In the middle of her recitation, Alistair nodded and began quote along with her, matching her bored, sing-song tone.

"_Those who had sought to claim  
Heaven by violence destroyed it. What was  
Golden and pure turned black.  
Those who had once been mage-lords,  
The brightest of their age,  
Were no longer men, but monsters_"

"And here I thought it was only in the monastery that they made us memorize that whole thing," he remarked, smirking.

"Oh, no," Rìona said with a soft laugh. "To Aldous, learning the Chant of Light was second in importance only to knowing the whole history of the Cousland family since the time before King Calenhad and the unification of Ferelden. But actual scholastic accounts of the Blights are actually quite rare. It's all been buried in Chantry lore. As such, I could never really be certain how much was actual fact and how much was merely drivel intended to justify the Chantry's treatment of mages, so I'm afraid I never really knew what to take as truth."

"Well, those things you saw at Ostagar, those are the truth," Alistair told her flatly. "They'll kill, and maim, and corrupt the earth until nothing can live or grow upon it. They say there are parts of the Anderfels where the corpses from the First and Second Blights, nearly a thousand years ago, have never decomposed properly, because the insects and other creatures that feed on the dead don't exist there to devour them. If we don't stop them, Ferelden will only be the first to fall."

"And that is what Duncan feared," she murmured, almost to herself.

Alistair nodded grimly. "He knew our odds weren't good at Ostagar, but he said he'd do everything he could to give us a chance."

Including recruiting a girl raised with a whore's skills to seduce the king, even if it meant her death. "He must have been desperate."

Another nod, this one with a bitter twist of his mouth. "Wouldn't you be?"

Again, the awkward silence. Rìona swallowed hard and forced herself to speak. "I'm... sorry you lost Duncan, and all your comrades. I never had a chance to know the other Grey Wardens, but I know they were important to you."

"Thank you." She could tell by his strained expression that he was struggling against tears and it awoke her own grief. They might be strangers, but they had a common purpose, and they both knew about loss.

"He was dying, you know," Alistair said after a long moment, drawing a deep breath to compose himself.

"I beg your pardon?"

"That's, um, that's another thing about being a Grey Warden that no one tells you until after your Joining." Alistair cleared his throat. "The good news is, you won't have to worry about dying of old age. You've got thirty years, more or less. The Joining doesn't _quite_ make us immune to the darkspawn taint, all it does is delay it for a while. Sooner or later, though, the real nightmares begin. Steadier than the ones we're having now, more constant, more vivid. If it goes on long enough, eventually you begin to transform in a ghoul, like anyone else exposed to the corruption. Or you would, except that Grey Warden tradition means that once you start to feel it happening—the Calling, is the word for it—you go to Orzammar, to the Deep Roads of the old dwarven kingdoms, to die in one last glorious battle against the darkspawn. Duncan had begun having the nightmares. He told me that, in private. Told me his time was coming. I guess he got what he wanted, in a way. He died fighting the darkspawn, rather than slowly becoming like them. I just wish it could have been the victory he'd hoped for, rather than this... betrayal and waste."

Tears burned her own eyes as she thought again about her father and mother, about Oriana and little Oren. Ser Gilmore, who hadn't deserved the way she had toyed with his affections. And Cailan, whose easy infatuation with her had burned so quickly and brightly.

"We'll stop Loghain," she heard herself vowing, her voice thick with emotion. "We'll stop this Blight, Alistair. For... all of them. I swear it."

An acerbic voice from the other side of the fire interrupted whatever response Alistair was going to make.

"If you two are quite finished with your campfire chit-chat, is it possible we might have silence for a while so those of us not interested in sniveling about lost comrades can get some sleep?" Morrigan demanded, rolling up on her side to level a glare upon them.

"It might behoove you to develop something resembling a feeling," Rìona said sharply. "Failing that, since you're awake, perhaps you ought to consider joining the campfire chit-chat, rather than deriding it, in the interest of getting to know your companions and making your travels with us more pleasant."

"I've no interest in bonding, thank you," the witch replied. "A solid night's sleep will make my travels as pleasant as I have any reasonable expectation of them being."

Rìona shook her head as Morrigan turned her back to them again, and offered Alistair another small smile. "Why don't you try to get some sleep? I'll take the next watch."

He nodded, propping himself up against a tree trunk in the absence of a proper bedroll. "Thank you," he murmured, closing his eyes. "Here's hoping I can sleep without being haunted by the idea that I should have been with Duncan, with them all, down there on that battlefield."

"He saved you, by insisting you go to the tower instead," Rìona said softly. "The best thing you can do to honor his memory now is to live."

"I know." Alistair nodded again, opening his eyes to look at her in the glow of the campfire. "I appreciate you letting me talk about him. It's helped. You know, I think he said he was from Highever, or maybe... that it was his home?"

Rìona stared at him. Duncan had called Highever his home?

"I... I didn't know that," Rìona whispered, glancing away with tears burning her eyes again as she thought of all that had been lost.

"Maybe someday I'll go there, do something to honor him."

She thought about Highever Castle, overrun by Howe's scum. "Maybe someday I'll go, too," she said softly, glancing away.

Across the fire, Morrigan huffed impatiently, and Alistair closed his eyes again with a contented smile.


	8. Chapter Eight: Ambushes

Despite Alistair's quips, Lothering was not, in fact, pretty as a painting.

As a major crossroads along the Imperial Highway and a stopping point between Denerim and Redcliffe, it was a large and busy village. At harvest season it hosted a bustling market where farmers from the Hinterlands and the southwestern Bannorn brought livestock and crops for trade.

For all that, it was also a very dirty and rustic village. Clearly the Bann of Lothering had no interest in improving it or turning it into the more sophisticated town it might have been with a little effort. The streets were dirt rather than cobbled, and now with the winter rains hard upon them, they ran with mud. The stream that wound through the middle of the village smelled strongly of offal and sewage, revealing that no effort had been put into proper sanitation.

The odor turned Rìona's stomach, making her swallow hard and hurry across the footbridge spanning the trench. She grimaced in distaste. Had one of the banns that looked to Highever run his village like this, her father would have rallied his freeholders and had him unseated and replaced with a more capable administrator.

Despite the mud, there was a large encampment of tents and lean-to shacks at the edges of the village where poorly dressed peasants huddled miserably. They were refugees from the Hinterlands, fleeing north ahead of the encroaching Blight. Just before reaching the village, she, Alistair, Conall and Morrigan had encountered a party of thugs looking to collect a "toll" for passage along the highway. The swine had thought it a great joke to have taken the last coin many of these wretches had possessed. When Rìona informed them that she had no coin to part with, the bandits had attacked her party, intent on looting the armor and weapons from their corpses.

It had been their last mistake, and now Alistair had flung over his shoulder a large satchel filled with the armor and weapons the bandits had been bearing, and Rìona wore at her waist a purse containing the coin she had taken from their leader; over a hundred silver that would help considerably in their efforts to resupply themselves.

Alistair, however, was scowling at the purse. "I can't believe you're not going to return that coin to the refugees those bandits stole it from," he said, not for the first time.

"Which refugees would those be, Alistair?" Rìona asked calmly, gesturing at the tents and lean-to shelters. "How are we to determine which of these poor wretches were robbed, and how much coin was taken from each of them? If we were to announce we are redistributing it, we would be mobbed with opportunists claiming they are due more than they actually are."

"Then donate it to the Chantry! Let them distribute it."

"And have it pay for the gold thread embroidering the Revered Mother's new robes?" Morrigan snorted.

"While I don't share Morrigan's cynicism, it is true that the Chantry does not lack for funds," Rìona said diplomatically. "We, however, cannot say the same. We need food, blankets and tents, herbs for poultices and potions, arrowheads and fletching. Morrigan has no shoes to speak of, and that splintmail you're wearing is about to rust right off your chest. We're not going to stop the Blight if we succumb to the elements or if a group of common bandits kills us because our armor and weapons are in disrepair. The Grey Wardens operated on tithes from the nobility, but we lack those resources and must make do however we can."

"You could always sell that sword upon your back," Morrigan suggested with a smirk. "That's gold laid into the hilt, if I'm not mistaken. 'Tis not like you actually use it."

Rìona touched the hilt of the Cousland family sword where it rode over her shoulder and shook her head. "This is the only heirloom of my family I have," she informed them. "I vowed to my father and mother that Arl Howe would die upon this blade."

The witch crossed her arms. "Your vengeance will not fill our bellies nor end the Blight."

Alistair shrugged helplessly. "She does have a point, if things are as bad as you say."

"Would you part with Duncan's sword if you had it in your hand, for any amount of money?" Rìona asked, lifting an eyebrow.

Alistair looked as though he might protest, then backed down. "No. I'd starve before I let go of a keepsake of his. I only wish I had one to remember him by."

"I promise I will _consider_ selling the sword if it comes down to being the only thing that will keep us functioning until we can gather our army and end the Blight," Rìona offered, compromising. "Today, however, thanks to the generosity of our bandit friends back there, I'm spared that necessity. Now, let's turn to our business here in Lothering. I would like to be on the road for Redcliffe first thing tomorrow, so let us divide our labors. Alistair, you go to the Chantry. Speak with the Revered Mother and see what aid she may render. The templars seem to be keeping order around the village since Teyrn Loghain took the Bann of Lothering and his army back to Denerim when he passed through here, so speak with them and see if there is a reward for killing the bandits."

He gawked at her. "You can't be serious! Request a reward for killing the robbers whom _we_ then subsequently robbed ourselves?"

"Will it salve your conscience if I also ask you, at the same time, to request that the templars inform those refugees who have reported being robbed that the bandits have been dealt with, and thus they might be able to recover their material possessions, if not their coin?"

Sighing, Alistair nodded. "Yes, that will help, thank you."

"Morrigan, you're the most intimidating of us," Rìona continued, turning her attention to the witch and handing her the purse. "I would like you to deal with buying our supplies. Get the best value you can for the gear we took off the bandits. Haggle like a fishwife and buy the merchants out of herbs, potions, and for the love of the Maker get yourself some boots. With this many refugees in the village, tents and blankets for bedrolls might be scarce. We may have to wait until Redcliffe to acquire those, especially with these wolf pelts you showed us how to stitch together into crude bedding. See what you can find, at any rate."

"What will you be doing?" Alistair asked, crouching to pet Conall.

"I'm going to look for odd jobs to bolster our funds," she answered, then looked at the mabari. "Conall, go hunting, boy!" Eagerly, the warhound ran off. After he had disappeared into the fields beyond the refugee encampment, Alistair stood as Rìona explained, "I overheard some of the refugees saying a mercenary company called the Blackstone Irregulars are recruiting at the inn. While I'm there I will also see if I can find us a decent meal and discover what other gossip I can pick up. My father always said if you want to know all the news of a land, sit in a tavern at a crossroads for a few hours."

"Right," Alistair gave her a skeptical look. "So we're off running errands while you're snug in the warm tavern with a bowl of stew and a tankard of ale?"

"I highly doubt there's any stew to be had in this town with all these refugees about," she retorted. "The Chantry should be warm enough. But hand over any coin you have on you; I don't trust that you'll be able to stand firm if the Revered Mother tries to guilt you into making a donation."

"Hey! I'm not that big a pushover!"

"Oh, really? So what was all that business at Ostagar about you running errands for the Revered Mother?"

He opened his mouth to protest then closed it with a snap and reached for his belt purse. "Maybe you ought to keep this, just in case."

"So you'd let your junior Warden hold your purse rather than stand up for yourself?" Morrigan asked disdainfully. "Will she be spoon-feeding you your supper next?"

Rìona pinned the witch with a hard stare. "Leave him alone, Morrigan. We've got a considerable amount of work to get done today; let's be about it."

She walked with Alistair for a while, intending to check the Chanter's Board outside the Chantry for employment opportunities before heading to the tavern. They parted at the doors of the Chantry and Rìona went back the way she had come after collecting a few notices from the Chanter's Board. She thought she might check on Morrigan's progress before continuing to the inn, but the witch was not in the market square where they had left her. At last, Rìona spied her standing between two men on the far side of the market, wearing an inviting smile and... laughing?

Puzzled, she drew nearer as Morrigan slid a hand down the muscled arm of one of the men. He wore rough homespun garb and looked very much like a farmer. Rìona couldn't hear what Morrigan leaned close to whisper to him, but she certainly knew flirting when she saw it. The man—who was not unattractive, but very unlike the sort of man she would have imagined the witch having a preference for—nodded eagerly and Morrigan took his hand and led him toward a nearby stable, with his friend following.

Rìona trailed after them at a discreet distance. She knew she ought to allow Morrigan her privacy if she had indeed decided to dally with a couple refugees, but she didn't trust the situation. The flirting woman she'd seen in the market square was not the same woman she'd been traveling with for over a week.

The door of the stable had been left slightly ajar, and Rìona peered inside to see Morrigan reclining on a mound of hay, her scrap of a shirt pushed aside to reveal her small but perfectly formed breasts. One of her hands toyed with her own nipple, pinching and then caressing soothingly. The other hand slid down her belly and into the loosened waist of the odd skirted garment she wore over her legs. Beneath the black fabric and leather straps, her fingers writhed as she pleasured herself.

The friend of the man she had been flirting with leaned close to her, touching her other breast and kissing her neck, but Morrigan pushed him away with a teasing laugh.

"'Twill be time enough for that later," she said. "Disrobe for me, both of you. I want to see what I am getting."

Obediently, the two men cast off their rough garments, stepping toward her again, but she evaded their hands with a flirtatious smile. "Not yet. I wish to see you both pleasure yourselves, as I am. Find your release now, and then you can watch me while you recover. 'Twill make the loving last longer."

The men looked hesitant, but Morrigan began masturbating more purposefully beneath her garb, moaning loudly and circling her hips. Their hands went to their shafts and began stroking, and their eyes quickly closed with pleasure.

The men were too distracted, pumping into their own fists, to notice the way Morrigan stopped pleasuring herself, all but the occasional stroke to maintain the illusion that she was doing so. Her eyes were intent upon them and her lips began to move. After a long, quiet moment, Rìona realized she was chanting in a strange tongue. Soon the unfamiliar words were overridden by the moans of the men as they worked themselves toward climax, their heads thrown back, the muscles on their necks straining. One achieved his release, his seed spraying across the hay, and the other began jerking and twisting his hand frantically. Morrigan released her breast, withdrew her hand from within her own garments and watched him, waiting.

A moment later he shouted, also finding his release, and then Morrigan called out a single word. A flare of power ran through the stable, jolting even Rìona. She blinked and shook her head to clear the buzzing in her ears and when she looked back at Morrigan, the witch was standing calmly, looking with a sneer of disdain down at the two men who were now lying on the seed-soaked straw and... snoring?

Completely composed, Morrigan turned to walk away, only to be brought up short when she found herself facing Rìona.

"Do you want to tell me what that was all about?" Rìona asked, trying to control her surprise.

"'Tis simple, really," Morrigan shrugged nonchalantly and proceeded Rìona out of the stable. "My mana was drained in the fight with the bandits, and I do not feel comfortable being in a town with this many templars without any power available. The spell is very old, taught to me by Flemeth. She discovered it in her youth, the ability to harness magical power from sexual energy, or so she claims. I imagine it's possible the Tevinter magisters knew long before she did, though there is no account of them ever using such an ability."

"While I can respect your... resourcefulness," Rìona said carefully, "we cannot afford to generate any ill-will in this town, not while we're still poorly supplied and unready to travel. Surely when those two wake up, they'll send the templars after you."

"You believe they will actually confess to being lured into a stable by an apostate mage, made to cast off their clothing, and pleasure themselves in front of one other before being placed under a simple sleep spell, do you?" Morrigan asked incredulously. "Besides, they shan't remember much, if anything, of the encounter. 'Twill be quite puzzling for them to wake up nude with one another, I imagine."

"And what if you run into them again?" she asked the witch. "Will they recognize you, or hold any resentment?"

"They will be asleep for many hours yet, so long as no one wakes them. 'Tis my hope we will be well gone before then. Even if we are not, I should imagine the two of them will wish to hide their faces for a while after the humiliation of being discovered in such a compromising position together."

Rìona considered for a moment, then nodded. "Very well, so long as we are not making trouble for ourselves here. You're heading back to the market now, then?"

"I am. How is your head injury? Any more pain?"

"My head—? Oh, that's fine. Nothing to worry about."

"You're certain? Because if you still have headaches, I can brew some more of the tea Mother offered you."

"Thank you, no," Rìona said with a shake of her head. She glanced away, unwilling to risk offending Morrigan by telling her that her parents, ever leery of blackmail and assassination attempts, had long ago advised her never to accept a tonic she hadn't seen prepared herself. "I don't... actually care for medicinal teas all that much. I'll be off to the tavern then, if there's nothing else you need?"

"Courtesy of those two fools in there, I am now quite capable of seeing to myself," Morrigan smirked. "I will find you in the tavern when I have completed making our purchases."

Bemused, Rìona watched the witch walk quickly back toward the market square. She wasn't certain what exactly it was that troubled her about what she had seen. Surely she, of all people, could respect the way Morrigan had used sex to her advantage. Indeed, it seemed rather hypocritical for Rìona to disapprove; hadn't her parents raised her to do much the same?

She gazed out over the field between the stables and the windmill on a small hill and saw a the tell-tale silvery leaves of an elfroot plant sticking up from the ground at the base of the stonework wall upon which ran the Imperial Highway. Morrigan had been teaching her and Alistair to identify the plants she used to make potions and poultices. Knowing it could be useful, Rìona began to cross the field to get to it.

A sound behind her made Rìona turn to see a small group of rough-clad men running toward her from the village. Concerned that they were in need of aid, Rìona shouldered her bow and awaited them.

Too late did she realize they were bearing pitchforks and cudgels.

"Is this the one?" A man who seemed to be the leader of the gang asked another.

"That's her all right," another man nodded. "The armor matches the description of the Grey Warden Teyrn Loghain's men were asking about."

The leader nodded grimly. "Sorry, Warden. I don't know if you killed the king, and Maker help me, I don't care. But that bounty Loghain is offering will fill a lot of hungry bellies. Don't make us hurt you. You'll come with us until we can track down the teyrn's men and turn you over."

Stunned, Rìona stared at them, unable to believe for a moment what she was hearing. Loghain was claiming she had killed the king?

Of course. What better way to excuse his own crimes than to pin them upon the Grey Wardens. She was a fool to have not expected this from the moment she learned of Loghain's treachery.

If Loghain was spreading slander about the Grey Wardens, then whatever happened, she must be certain to conduct herself in such a way as to reverse that opinion. Which meant fighting the villagers was out of the question. Untrained and crudely armed as they were, she doubted they should pose much of a problem even with her meager skill with blades, but if she should kill any of them it would only serve as proof of Loghain's accusations once word got out.

"I don't want to fight you, good sers," Rìona said, setting down her bow. "Whatever accusations Loghain has made, I assure you they are false. While the bounty Loghain is offering may be significant—I cannot say, for this is the first I've heard of it—how long shall it keep your bellies full if the Blight consumes the land and there is no food to be had? Shall you eat today only to fall victim to the Blight sickness tomorrow?"

The leader frowned, but nodded reluctantly. "That's a fair point, Warden. But it won't make a lick of difference how far the Blight spreads if we starve before it gets to us."

That, too, was a reasonable point, and one Rìona needed to ponder before she could counter it. Whatever else she did, she must make them sympathetic to her cause and convince them so completely of her innocence that turning her in would be unthinkable. If Loghain was issuing proclamations against the Wardens, she would start a word-of-mouth campaign to the contrary.

"If I give you my word of honor that I will make no effort to attack you or your comrades, ser, perhaps I can accompany you and we can discuss the matter. Then you may decide whether it is truly to your benefit to turn me in to Loghain's men?" offered Rìona, extending her hand.

The leader stared at her suspiciously for a moment, and accepted her hand. 

* * *

They took her to a man named Garrett Hawke, who turned out to be well-spoken and clearly educated. He could read and cipher and was generally considered by his compatriots to be a wise and reasonable man, which was why the villagers felt he was the best to determine whether or not they should turn Rìona in.

It was his younger brother, Carver, who had spotted Rìona and recognized her by the description of her armor. Rìona cursed herself for not having thought to get rid of the unique, custom-made set of leathers her father had gifted her before now, but how could she have known that Loghain would put a price on her head and accuse her of his own crime? Besides, even had she thought to sell the armor, here in the village there would be no one to trade it with. The few merchants that remained here were dealing in foodstuffs and survival gear for the refugees, not high-quality armor, even if she were willing to sell for a pittance of what the finely-crafted, gold-embossed dyed leathers were worth.

Rìona caught Hawke looking at her armor, his jaw tightening. Clearly the fact that her armor was well-made to the point of extravagance was a mark against Rìona in his book. Was he thinking Rìona lived a life of luxury while he and his family scrounged for scraps? She would have to disabuse this Master Hawke of that notion, and quickly.

He dismissed the other village men once they brought Rìona to the humble house on a freehold outside the village, instructing them not to make any effort to notify Loghain's men until he'd had a chance to negotiate with the Warden. The men agreed, treating Hawke with deference and respect. A natural leader, this Hawke was. They would obey his instructions because they had no reason to mistrust that he would act in their best interest.

Hawke treated her as courteously as any guest, offering to brew a pot of tea. It was an offer Rìona accepted gratefully.

"Thank you, kind ser," she murmured, accepting the cup of fragrant, steaming brew when it was prepared.

"Enjoy it," Hawke said gruffly. "It's the last of my tea and there's no more to be had from here to halfway to Denerim."

"Then I am in your debt," replied Rìona, sipping. "It's been a great many weeks since I've known such luxury as a hot cup of tea."

He gave her a skeptical look. "You don't look like you suffer for luxuries," he observed carefully.

"Would you like to see the soles of my boots, ser?" she challenged. "It's a certainty that they are well-worn by now, and in need of repair. Observe how begrimed my armor is with darkspawn filth. This simple home of yours is far more luxurious than anywhere I've slept recently. Nearly two months now, I've been traveling by foot and sleeping on the ground, since my home was overrun by brigands and my family slaughtered. I went to Ostagar seeking justice from the king, only to lose that as well to Teyrn Loghain's traitorous madness. Now I find myself called upon to unite a country against the Blight while Loghain attempts to divide it in civil war. If you think I've been idling in luxury, ser, you are a fool, and you do not strike me as a fool."

"Maybe that's true and maybe it isn't," Hawke shrugged. "All I know is that with these refugees flooding through Lothering, there's precious little by way of food and supplies to be found to provision us for the trip north, away from the Blight."

Rìona shook her head. "That plain porridge you have simmering by the fire is the most savory meal I've seen since awakening to find my comrades had been abandoned by the teyrn and slain by darkspawn. Game has been scarce and it has been many days since I've fed on aught but sickly and half-starved rabbits. I understand your plight well, if you care to take my word on it, for I've no interest in comparing tales of hardship any further."

"You speak like a noblewoman, and you have a lot of gear that could be sold to feed you," the freeholder argued. "There aren't many folks around these parts that can say the same."

"Would you like my armor?" Rìona asked curtly, rising to remove her pauldrons and unbuckle her cuirass. "I'll give it to you gladly. If Loghain has spread my description alongside his lies, it's become a luxury I can ill afford."

She set the cuirass aside, leaving her in her linen shirt. "It's yours if you want it. I doubt you'll have much luck selling it, however, at least not until you reach Denerim or the northern ports. And I'd be careful to whom you sell it, also, for if the teyrn has armor merchants on the lookout for it, you may find the bargain price to be Loghain's noose."

She bent to remove her war skirt as well, drawing from Hawke a startled glance. "You're serious?"

"I am indeed, ser. If your desire is to feed families, this armor could feed many and you'd be doing me a service helping me rid myself of it. I cannot offer you my bow, for it is the weapon at which I am most proficient, and my sword is a family heirloom."

"And just how do you intend to fight the Blight without armor, Warden?"

"I know not," shrugged Rìona. "Perhaps I'll be fortunate enough to come across another gang of bandits like the ones I slew on the highway to Lothering, perhaps this time with a woman amongst them who is near my own size. It is, I admit, a great deal to leave to chance. For certain, I shall not be able to afford even a simpler set, for my coin is scarce, but coin shall avail me nothing if I am taken by Loghain's soldiers.

"Besides," She favored him with an arched brow as she sat upon the floor in nothing but her linen shirt to remove her poleyns and boots. "What does it matter to you how I shall fight the Blight if you intend to turn me in?"

He had the grace to look discomfited at that. "All things being equal, I'd just as soon not, my lady Warden. But these are desperate times. Anyway, isn't that what we're meant to be negotiating?"

"It is indeed," Rìona conceded, rising and adding her boots to the pile of armor. She saw Hawke's eyes traverse the bare expanse of her legs between her woolen stockings and the hem of her linen shirt on their own volition.

That was interesting.

Rìona repressed a smile as she sat upon the chair once more to take up her tea cup. For once, carnal matters had been the furthest thing from her mind, stunned as she was by the news of Loghain's slander. But such was what she had been trained and recruited for, after all, and Rìona was quick to discern the advantages. He was an attractive man; it would certainly be no hardship to seduce him, if it came to that.

"Is there a Mistress Hawke?" she asked, sipping her tea.

"She died some four years ago of hydrophobia after being bitten by a mad dog," he answered, making himself look away. "The Maker only granted us one child, a daughter, and she died not long after she was born. My mother and younger brother and sister are all the family I have now. We'll be fleeing Lothering together."

"You have my sympathies, ser," said Rìona somberly. "I know only too well what it is to be without kith or kin."

"You said your family had been slain?"

Rìona nodded, her eyes growing distant as she told the tale of the attack on her home and Arl Howe's treachery. It felt wrong, using their deaths so cynically to play upon his sympathies, and yet she sensed in this man the sort of magnetism that made people heed his words. If she could win him to her side, win his support for the Grey Wardens, perhaps she might offset the worst of Loghain's damage.

Hawke gazed at her with sympathy. "Around Lothering, we know only too well about corrupt nobles. Our bann is a real piece of work, but there is no one else in proximity to throw our allegiance to."

"Why do your freeholders not choose to elevate new bann?"

"The bann already has all the troops and duty income. There isn't money or men enough to get a new bannorn off the ground, and with the Bann of Lothering already in possession of an army sworn to his service, any attempt to overthrow him would be a slaughter. Besides," he shrugged. "Lothering will soon be abandoned, anyhow."

Rìona inclined her head, acknowledging his point.

"You came here to make your case for why the villagers shouldn't turn you in for the bounty," Hawke said, draining his tea. "So make it."

Rìona sighed. "Most of those villagers have never seen a darkspawn. They know the Blight is a threat but they know nothing of the true extent of it. I've battled these creatures, _felt_ the power of the archdemon driving them. I'm not unsympathetic to the plight of the villagers and refugees. I was glad to kill the bandits preying upon them. But times will be much leaner before all is said and done. What food they manage to buy with the bounty on my head will be eaten, but the Blight will persist long after my neck has been stretched by Loghain's hangman and their bellies are once again empty. They will win themselves a reprieve, nothing more."

"A reprieve may very well buy them enough time to flee," he pointed out.

"Flee to where?" Rìona asked incredulously. "Denerim? The Coastlands? Will my bounty buy all of them passage to the Free Marches or beyond, assuming they can find such passage in the first place? Ships departing the northern ports to dare the Waking Sea in winter will be over-full, and Loghain has no doubt closed off the mountain passes because he fears the Orlesians. He'll need to rebuild the army lost at Ostagar and in his madness, I wouldn't be surprised if he resorts to impressment, which means he's going to be loathe to allow able-bodied Fereldan citizens to cross the borders and flee to other lands. Without the Grey Wardens, it's only a matter of time before all of Ferelden will be overrun, and once the Bannorn falls, food's going to become very scarce indeed."

"All that may be true," acknowledged Hawke. "But the future matters little when the survival in the present moment is at risk. There comes a time when one must resolve to look to his present well-being and let the future take care of itself."

"I'm afraid I have no ready answer for that," Rìona sighed. "Die sooner of starvation or later as a cannibalistic creature corrupted by the Blight, the choice is yours.

"For myself," she rose in a fluid, uncurling movement, setting aside her tea to cross to him. His dark eyes were upon her, sliding up her bare legs and studying the movements of her linen shirt intently, as though it might give some indication of what lay beneath. Pleased that she had his attention, she knelt at his feet. "I'd rather die of hunger than as a ghoul, and choose the path of freedom."

"What are you doing?" he asked carefully, though the heat in his eyes spoke of something much less cautious.

"My journey has been long and wearying, and I am very much alone," Rìona murmured, unhappy with the lie but unwilling to let on about Alistair's presence in the village. "I've lost my family, my comrades, even my intended husband in these months past. If your decision is going to be to turn me over to Loghain's men, I should first like to have a final moment wherein I choose my fate."

His eyes narrowed with a canny look. "Do you think to sway my decision by offering yourself to me?" his eyes narrowed with a canny look.

Rìona smiled softly, taking up his hand and brushing her lips softly across the knuckles. His palms were calloused in an unmistakable pattern, as Duncan's and Cailan's had been; this man was familiar with the sword. "The thought _had_ occurred to me. Alas, I've no time to be subtle about it. As you've so astutely observed, the survival of the moment sometimes takes precedence. You've been a widower for many years now. In a village such as this, discreet companionship cannot be all that easy to come by. But what I said before was true; I've known little of free choice these last months. I would have something of my own, before my fate is decided."

He stood abruptly, pulling her up with him by her hand. His fingers made short work of the ties at the side of the leather loin covering underneath her tunic and then plunged inside her smallclothes before it had completed its journey to the floor. Rìona whimpered and her knees buckled a little as his fingers found her slick and ready.

"Oh, Maker," she sighed, her head falling back.

Carefully he withdrew her hand. "You're not lying," said Hawke, looking at her in bemusement. "As honored as I am by the offer, you've already made your case, and it would be unconscionable of me to accept when my mind is already made up. And besides, my mother and sister should be home soon; there's no time to do the matter justice here."

Rìona's heart sank. "Then you've decided to turn me in," she said flatly, withdrawing from him. She supposed she ought to be impressed that he was honorable enough not to take her and then turn her in, but it still stung.

"Don your armor, Warden," Hawke replied with a hint of a smile. "Keep it until you can trade it for another, less easily identifiable set. You are free, and I should hate to explain to the other men of the village why you are in your smallclothes when I summon them in here to tell them my reasons."

Startled, Rìona blinked. "I.. thank you, Master Hawke."

He helped her back into her armor, and made free enough with his hands while he did so that she knew he did regret having to decline her offer. It was no great hardship to suffer his pawing, except for the frustration of unfulfilled desire which his caresses did nothing to alleviate. Only once she was armed again did he seize her, his hand clenching on the back of her head, and drag her forward into a demanding kiss, his tongue thrusting hungrily against hers.

"You'll never know what my gallantry this day has cost me, my lady Warden," he growled when it was over. "If your business in the village is not completed today, come and sleep here for the night. If you wish to."

"I thank you for the offer," Rìona replied, "but... I confess am not quite so alone as perhaps I made out. Forgive me the deception; I but sought to protect those who traveled with me. I have three companions; a mabari warhound, one other surviving Grey Warden, and an apostate mage from the Korcari Wilds who has come to help against the Blight."

"I see." His eyes widened when she mentioned the apostate mage, and a slight smile crossed his face. "Bring them with you, then. Even our barn will prove more comfortable than a bedroll on the cold ground, at least for the night."


	9. Chapter Nine: Rage and Lothering

Hawke summoned the villagers who lingered outside his small house in to explain to him why they were better off letting the Grey Wardens go. His mother and sister did indeed arrive soon thereafter and Rìona was introduced to them before she left, promising to return that night.

The village now seemed a much more treacherous place, for she did not know where Loghain's men were. If the villagers had intended to contact them, they must be nearby, but where? Were they camped somewhere outside town, or had they taken rooms at one of the inns? Morrigan and Alistair would be looking to meet her soon at the tavern, but now she wasn't sure it was safe. If they encountered Loghain's soldiers there...

But if she sought out either one of them, she might miss the other and let them bumble unsuspectingly into a trap. And she could not be seen walking through the village in her distinctive armor.

It was only by the Maker's very own mercy that she encountered a refugee outside the tavern who was prone to gossip. Once he remarked about the soldiers inside, Rìona decided to stay outside and attempt to hide by a shadowy corner of the building and keep an eye on the approach to the tavern to intercept Alistair and Morrigan before they went inside.

Subterfuge, however, was nothing she had ever trained for, and it did not occur to her to keep an eye on the comings and goings from the privy behind the tavern. She never saw the approach of a rough-dressed man until he had a dagger at her throat.

"Sorry, Warden. Not all of us agree with Hawke's decision. And with those what do out of the question, there's fewer to divide that bounty amongst. Nice and gentle, now. I don't rightly care if I claim the bounty by turning you in or by bringing your corpse in instead. Let's go inside."

If she wrenched away, there was a good chance his blade would open her throat, and so Rìona found herself with little choice but to be prodded inside.

"Well, look what we have here, men! I think we've just been blessed." A soldier, who oddly enough did not bear the wyvern device of Gwaren, remarked as Rìona was shoved toward him.

"Haven't we been asking around all morning about a woman by this very description?" A helmeted warrior who wore the insignia of a lieutenant asked.

The first one who had spoken, the dark, stubbled one with the commander's insignia, made a frown of mock disappointment. "It seems we were lied to."

The villager who had led her inside withdrew his dagger now that she was surrounded. "This is the one. Now, about that bounty...?"

The commander dug in his belt pouch and withdrew a small leather purse, tossing it at the man. "Take it and get out." With a bow, the villager obeyed.

There were at least five of them, pressing in close, surrounding her. No, make that six. One held back a little, armed with a bow. Rìona looked to either side of the archer at the milling patrons. If it came to combat, a poorly-timed drunken stagger could send one into the crossfire. Maker's blood, what was the fool thinking, using a bow in such close quarters with innocent bystanders about?

She thought of her own bow, slung over her shoulder, and realized it would be useless. Though she could fire from point blank range, and even with distraction, there was no way she could take all of them out before they cut her down. Unless she distracted them, they would still be here when Alistair entered the tavern. She wasn't nearly skilled enough with her daggers to take on this many swordsmen, either, unless they were astoundingly inept. Given that they were Loghain's men, and the teyrn had a reputation for martial excellence, she doubted very much that would be the case.

Sweet Andraste, why had she divided her party? Why had she sent Conall hunting? Why had it never occurred to her that Loghain would station his men at the crossroads to seek for survivors from Ostagar who could spread the tale of his treachery?

"Gentlemen," came a sweet, lilting, Orlesian-accented voice from over Rìona's shoulder. Rìona risked a quick glance to the side to see a lovely woman with flaming red hair, wearing the robes of a lay sister approach. Incongruously, the hilt of a sword protruded above her shoulders. "Surely there is no need for trouble. This woman is no doubt just another poor soul seeking refuge."

"Stay out of this, sister," the commander snapped. "This woman is a traitor, and we're taking her to Denerim to hang for the death of the king."

A hot denial rose to her lips, but Rìona bit it back. If she provoked them, they might decide to kill her without benefit of a trial. If the sister was skilled with that sword she bore, perhaps they might stand a chance, despite being outnumbered, but it was a risk. At worst, she would get the Chantry sister or one of the other patrons killed, if she forced a fight, and she would die for her trouble.

And if she died, who would warn Alistair that Loghain's men were hunting for them?

"Please, sister, don't interfere," Rìona begged, turning her gaze fully to the robed woman. "The tavern is too full. I do not want the death of any bystanders on my conscience."

Holding the sister's eyes, she extended her empty hands to the commander and found herself surrendering for the second time that day. "I yield, ser. This need not come to violence."

"Get her weapons," the commander barked to his men, and they took her bow. That didn't distress her nearly so much as when they unbuckled the baldric holding the scabbard of the Cousland sword upon her back. She felt a pang of anxiety at having it taken from her. She must find a way to get it back. She must.

"Any other traitors survive with you, Warden?" the commander demanded.

Rìona shook her head, taking care not to make the gesture either too eager or emphatic and give the impression of protesting too vehemently. "I've been wandering alone for two weeks since Ostagar, lost in the Wilds and the forests of the Hinterlands," she answered, trying to sound bewildered and helpless. But she continued to stare intently at the sister as she spoke, hoping the strange woman would intuit that she was lying and seek out her companions to warn them. "Everyone is dead."

The sister's mouth moved, twitched almost imperceptibly, and her head bowed in a slight nod. "Can you men not see this poor woman has been traumatized?" she demanded of the soldiers. "Surely you can show some mercy..."

The commander ignored her protests, though, and Rìona clenched her fists as he men bound her wrists, her nails digging into her palms at the humiliation of surrender. "Bring her. If the sister interferes, kill her," he barked at his men. "It's too late to leave today, especially in this rain. We march at first light for Denerim."

They prodded her up the stairs of the inn, staggering and unable to clutch the rough wooden banister for support, to one of the rooms they had taken when Loghain's forces had passed through the village and left them behind. This was why there was no room for the refugees to stay at the inn, Rìona realized angrily. Loghain's men had commandeered rooms for themselves before the refugees started flooding in and hadn't relinquished them even as the village became more and more overrun. They slept in comfort while suckling babes slept in damp tents and caught ill with the lung-fever.

Her indignation aside, that told her a good deal of what she needed to know about these men. They were not knights, not sworn to any code of conduct or noble comportment. Truthfully, they were little better than hired thugs, which was surprising. They did not behave with the professionalism she would have expected men under his banner to exhibit.

Had the teyrn taken to hiring mercenaries? She could see him doing so after the battle at Ostagar, since the loss of the royal army would mean Ferelden would be desperately in need to supplemental troops, but for these men to have been left behind when Loghain passed through Lothering meant he would have hired them before Ostagar.

Why would he have done such a thing, when he had his own troops to command?

But that question would need to wait for another time. For now, she needed to find a way to win her freedom without compromising Alistair's safety. If she could somehow catch them without their weapons, or surprise them...

Puzzled and lost in her thoughts, she barely noticed that all six of them crowded into the small room after her, until she turned to speak and the back of the commanders gauntlet-encased hand caught her across the face, laying open her cheek and sending her flying into the far wall of the cramped chamber.

"Oh, what a shame," he mocked, stripping off his gauntlets as he followed her. "My men and I were given leave to do whatever it takes to subdue any traitors we happened to capture. Such a pity you decided to resist. It'll go much harder on you."

"I'm not—" Another blow, this one with a closed fist, filled her head with brilliant white light and spun her about, sending her crashing to the floor. She tasted blood from her split lips.

They would beat her for their own cruel amusement, she thought, shaking her head in an effort to clear it. Not professionals at all, these men. Well-trained troops wouldn't take the time to needlessly abuse a prisoner they were supposed to be delivering for trial. Common hired thugs, nothing more.

Suddenly, everything about her took on the red haze of anger and Rìona snarled in fury. Ever since the night Highever had fallen, she'd found herself at the mercy of others. Duncan, Cailan, Loghain. Nothing that had transpired since had been born of her own will. All her girlish dreams of courtly intrigue and seduction had been tarnished and shattered, all her youthful ambition had been warped to a desperate fight for mere survival. And now she was at the hands of sadistic and undisciplined miscreants who wouldn't even honor her surrender and treat her with dignity.

Rage flooded her, made her feel alive in a way nothing had since she had fled Highever with Duncan. It made the pleasure she'd found in Cailan's bed, or with Duncan or even Daveth, pale in comparison. Her blood rushed and sang within her veins a song of defiance and spite.

And yet... perhaps she could use this to her advantage. Oddly, it was thoughts of Nan that came to her as she attempted to regain her feet. Nan with her nursery tales of clever and heroic men and women who turned certain defeat into victory with their wits, often convincing their foes to do the thing the hero wanted them to do by persuading them that it was the one thing the hero didn't want.

If she could get them to lay down their weapons...

_It is a dangerous art you practice, true, but a powerful one as well. And you will need every weapon you can wield to defeat this Blight._

Rìona seized upon a desperate plan. If it had worked with the king, why not these brutes?

"Please," Rìona gasped with Flemeth's words echoing in her ears as she spat blood upon the floor. "I beg you, don't rape me."

"You hear that, men?" the commander said with a trollish snort of laughter. "Her neck's going to stretch when she gets to Denerim and all she can worry about is her virtue. What's the matter, my lady? Us lot too common for the likes of you?"

They swarmed her, then, rough hands pulling at the buckles of her armor and tossing it and her weapons into a far corner. Some feral instinct bade her struggle and she obeyed it; not much, merely enough to make them hurt her more. Let them think they needed to subdue her. They would not have her supine and acquiescent. She glared at them as they tore away her linen undergarments.

The men that weren't restraining or hitting her were stripping, she noted triumphantly, removing their armor and weapons, heaping them in a pile, and the first among them was the commander. The others followed his lead. Only the lieutenant hung back cautiously, not yet stripping or laying aside his weapons. She needed them all unarmed, and so she waited.

Hard hands pulled and pinched at her, bruising her breasts and buttocks, ripping strands of hair from her scalp. Her face ached, swelling with bruises, but over the pain was the _anger_! There was a delicious pleasure to the fury and hatred, and she wanted more of it, wanted to stop feeling weak and helpless and buffeted about by the winds of chance as she had these past weeks.

"Wetter than Andraste's tears, she is!" one said, laughing crudely, as he thrust his hand between her thighs, and Rìona realized it was true. With the rage had come arousal. And Maker help her, there was pleasure as well. She opened her arms to it, welcomed it. This was hers, she thought in wild defiance. Pleasure was her province, and they could not take it from her.

Nude now, the commander stepped forward, and that seemed to be the signal for the lieutenant to begin removing his weapons. Now she would begin.

The hard knuckles of the back of the commander's hand rocked her head to the side, bringing more blood to the clotting wound his gauntlet had opened earlier upon her cheek. "If you're enjoying yourself, slut, we're doing something wrong," he said menacingly and grabbed her by the hair to lift her head and strike her again.

She needed to get to the weapons, she thought through the fog of pain. She remembered how she'd let Cailan deliberately herd her toward his bed and positioned herself so that the next blow would send her reeling in the direction of the piled weapons and armor.

The commander attempted to force her to her knees and when Rìona fought, he hit her again. She stumbled more than the blow really ought to have caused, and he chased after her, down the narrow alley between the bed and the wall to the corner where the arms had been carelessly tossed. She let his next backhanded slap send her crashing to the floor, as though her legs would no longer support her.

She huddled there a moment, whimpers of genuine pain escaping from her throat as she gingerly tested her limbs to see if they would obey her command. Her body protested the idea of any vigorous movement, but that searing core of anger deep within was eager and willing. The other soldiers lounged indolently about, watching with cruel, gleaming eyes as they waited for the commander to have his turn. They laughed at her whimpers and moans, congratulating one another on breaking her defiance. Rìona closed her eyes and let them think her broken.

This was her moment, she thought, drawing a deep breath, her heart racing and her blood singing with that marvelous rage. She was Lady Rìona Cousland, the woman who would have been queen. She would not be defeated by Loghain's bullying swine.

When the commander grabbed for her, she drove the dagger she had surreptitiously seized through his foot, still encased in its black woolen stocking. It emerged out the other side, pinning him to the floor, and as he howled, she brought the other dagger up between his legs, pressing the tip carefully to the dangling sack behind his erect shaft.

Too late, the others realized she was armed-and worse, that she and their commander blocked the narrow passage between the bed and the wall to the careless pile where they had discarded their weapons.

"Call your men off," she snarled, pricking the hair-covered and wrinkled skin of his sac with the tip of the dagger and drawing a panicked shriek from him.

"Back off!" the commander screamed, his voice cracking in pain and alarm. "For the love of Andraste, fall back!"

"Remove your clothing," she demanded, looking past the commander's hip at the rest of them. Some were already completely nude; others has removed their breeches but kept their linen shirts. The lieutenant was nearly fully clothed; he had only removed his armor and weapons.

It was the lieutenant she watched, for his eyes were the ones that cast around the room with slow deliberation, seeking some advantage. She pricked the commander more firmly with the point of the dagger, drawing another scream from him, and the lieutenant's eyes flew back to her.

"You may get the drop on me," she vowed softly, "but not before I geld him."

"If you kill him, I take command," the lieutenant said with cold arrogance.

"If you take command, you have no one to blame the failure of your company upon," Rìona replied, a smile curving her bruised lips. "His incompetence is your shield. I imagine the teyrn takes a dim view of failure and that the fee he paid for your services will be considerably lessened in light of your failure here. Now disrobe."

The lieutenant glared at her, but Rìona felt calm, almost peaceful. They might yet manage to kill her, but she'd won a victory against them and she had not let them humble her. She moved the dagger and spoke almost affectionately to the commander. "Best encourage your men to obey, Commander," she advised. "That cock you were so eager to wield won't do you much good without _these_."

"Do it!" he yelled, moaning in pain as he attempted to move his skewered foot. "Maker's ass, do it!"

Grumbling, the men disrobed and, at Rìona's order, tossed their clothing upon the bed.

"Now order them from the room."

"But we ain't got no bloody clothes on!" one of them protested.

"You should have thought of that before you discarded your weapons and armor," Rìona admonished. "If you were Highever troops under my command, I'd have you flogged and discharged for your carelessness, disarming yourselves to sport with a prisoner. _Idiots!_ Now clear the room or your commander will be the featured soprano in the Chantry chorus."

They did as she instructed, the lieutenant exiting last, backing out without taking his eyes from her. Only once the door was shut behind them did she tell the commander, "You, too. Take off your shirt."

Shaking and sweating with pain and fear, he did as she bade him, and when he was nude, she pressed the dagger against his sac harder. He tried to rise up on tip-toe to evade the point, but that caused him to scream in agony at the pain in his foot. She felt a droplet of water splash upon her shoulder, but whether he was sweating or crying, she could not say.

"Now, then, this should make a fitting display for the tavern patrons as they see you hobbling away in fear and humiliation. You wield this thing so proudly when you've got an unarmed woman on her knees, I think it generous to let the whole village see just what you have to offer."

He let out a small, blubbering moan and Rìona jerked the dagger out of his foot in a single quick pull and rose to her feet. The commander screamed again and slumped against the wall, nearly fainting with the pain. Rìona drew closer to him, grabbing his hair at the nape as he had held hers.

"I want you to take a message to Loghain for me," she said softly.

"Anything!" he vowed as her dagger pressed against his lower belly, just above the groin where his erection was slowly wilting.

"Tell Loghain," she whispered, and drew her tongue across his lips in a parody of a kiss, "that the Grey Wardens know what he did. Tell him... that I'm coming for him."

The commander closed his eyes and whimpered pathetically, and then he shrieked as she pulled back and drew the dagger up the length of his shaft in a swift motion, scoring a long, deep cut that began to bleed profusely. Holding his bleeding cock in his hand, the commander hobbled from the room as quickly as his wounded foot would allow him to limp, not bothering to close the door behind him.

Trembling with pain and exhaustion and a strange euphoria, Rìona sank down to sit on the edge of the bed, holding the bloody dagger loosely in her lap. Every muscle in her body ached, and her face was stiff with bruises. Dark bruises and weals stood out against her pale skin, dotting her body at intervals. But she was alive and she was free. She had won.

Despite her aching weariness, there was also a sense of elation at her victory. She began to understand what Flemeth had meant that day in the Wilds when she spoke of Rìona's skills being a form of power. She had never understood that, in all her years of learning how to seduce and charm. Her parents had taught her how to wheedle and flirt and cajole, to win someone's favorable regard and affection. She'd never understood that the promise of pleasure could get a hardened soldier to lay aside his arms and drop his guard.

She might be only passable with her daggers and merely proficient with her bow, but she was an expert at pleasure, and that was a keener weapon than she had ever guessed.

"Maker's breath!" A horrified gasp came from the open doorway, and Rìona raised her eyes to see the red-haired lay sister staring at her in shock. She couldn't imagine what she looked like. Likely that was a small mercy.

Something flickered in the sister's eyes. Some sort of horrible familiarity or recognition. Her mouth tightened, and it took her a moment to stammer, "I saw... the soldiers run out of the tavern. They made quite the spectacle, but when you did not appear, I grew concerned."

"I'm fine," Rìona muttered, setting aside her dagger. "It's nothing that won't heal."

"You... allowed this," the sister said in disbelief. "Rather than take the chance that innocents might be injured in a fight, you let them do this!"

"No, sister, don't." Rìona shook her head, the thrill of elation at her victory fading. Everything throbbed and she felt unbearably filthy. "I'm not that altruistic."

"But it's true what they say about the Grey Wardens, then? Warriors without equal, they call you. Even outnumbered and unarmed, you defeated them."

"Believe that if it gives you comfort." Rìona dropped her eyes, not sure she could make the Chantry sister understand what had happened here. The Chantry took a dim view of wantonness, after all. To tell the sister that it had been the fury of having been pushed too far rather than any sort of martial prowess which had enabled her to prevail against the soldiers seemed rather pointless.

"Please, sister," Rìona sighed instead. "My companions will come looking for me soon, and I would really rather they not see me in this state. If you could please just summon a chambermaid to bring some water so that I may bathe, and perhaps locate some poultices—?"

"Of course!" The red-haired lay sister left the room, and moments later returned. "The maid shall be here shortly, and when I told the innkeeper that you were responsible for driving out the soldiers after they had been making trouble for days, he said you may use the room for as long as you wish."

"That's very generous," Rìona murmured, unwilling to think of sleeping here. "But there are refugees who need the rooms far more than my company. We've been offered the use of a villager's barn, and it will do."

"Of course!" The sister looked dismayed for a moment, as though she feared she had said or done something tactless, but then she offered Rìona an encouraging look. "My name is Leliana. I shall help you bathe and dress, and while I do, I would like to tell you why you should allow me to join your company."

Several buckets of hot water were delivered straightaway, and a supply of linen clothes to wash with. Sore as she was, Rìona bathed herself, but allowed Leliana to wash her back and help her dab a herb poultice into the worst of her cuts and bruises and bandage it in place with shredded strips of the soldier's clothing. There was little she could do about her face until she could lie down for the night, and Rìona could only hope she wasn't permanently disfigured by the blows she had sustained. Her nose didn't appear to be broken, at least.

Unfortunately, the process took longer than she had hoped, and Alistair and Morrigan located her before she could move to another room, one where the signs of the nature of the struggle that had taken place weren't so obvious. It was Morrigan who found her first, taking in the scene with a detached glance around the room. Rìona braced herself for a scathing remark, but all the witch asked was, "I assume the enemies who did this deed have been dealt with?"

Leliana gave a small giggle at that, then cast an apologetic glance at Rìona. "If you call being driven out of town without their clothing 'dealt with' then you could say that," the sister replied.

Morrigan nodded in satisfaction. "Very well, then. When you're recovered, I would like you to accompany me to the outskirts of town. There's a creature there that has been locked in a cage by the Chantry, and I believe we should free him."

"The qunari?" Leliana asked, pulling the smallest linen shirt from the pile of clothing the soldiers had left behind and offering it to Rìona to replace the one they had torn off her. "It doesn't smell very good, but it's the closest we can come to your size," she said apologetically. "They say the qunari murdered a farm family, even the children. He's been in that cage without food or water for weeks; I would have expected him to be dead by now."

"He's very much alive," Morrigan replied, "though for how much longer is uncertain. When the village is abandoned, he will be left here for the darkspawn. Is this the mercy of your Chantry?"

Leliana dropped her eyes, looking troubled. "No. No one deserves such a fate."

"Can he fight?" Rìona inquired. "While I'm certainly willing to extend him mercy, I cannot let him run free, especially if he's guilty of the crime. But if he's skilled at arms, perhaps we can use him."

Morrigan gave a brusque nod. "'Twill have to do," she agreed.

"Maker's blood!" Rìona's head emerged from the neck hole of the linen shirt to see Alistair in the doorway. He gawked in horror for a moment, then he noticed she was half dressed and turned his back quickly.

Had the circumstances been different, she might have been amused. "Are you all right?" he called over his shoulder.

"Yes," Rìona answered wearily, buckling her war skirt over the hem of the shirt. Her smallclothes had been ruined with the rest of her garments, but Leliana had offered her a pair from the bundle of clothing she carried. Undergarments were yet another thing they would need to resupply at some point, she realized. They could sell the weapons and armor the soldiers had left behind, though—that which they could not use to improve their own gear, she thought, taking in Alistair's rusty splintmail—and hopefully that would leave them enough coin to afford such luxuries as a change of smallclothes.

Of course, now they needed to find armor for Leliana, and possibly this qunari Morrigan wanted to release. Not to mention more tents and bedrolls.

An idea struck her. "Morrigan, check the other rooms the soldiers who took me prisoner vacated and see if they left any other gear. If they were marching with Loghain's troops, they might have bedrolls and tents and rations."

The witch nodded and left to do her bidding, and Rìona allowed Leliana to help buckle her into her cuirass and vambraces. The Chantry sister knew her way around weapons and armor; there might be some truth to her claim that she was a competent fighter before she joined the Chantry.

"You can turn around, Alistair," she sighed, and Alistair did so, his complexion a furious shade of red, though he paled considerably when he noticed her bruised and swollen face.

"What happened here?" he asked, the inquiry almost plaintive.

"Loghain had stationed some troops here to keep an eye out for any survivors from Ostagar, and for us in particular," Rìona answered. "His men knew my description, and likely yours as well. He's spreading the word that the Grey Wardens betrayed the king."

"I knew that last bit," he nodded. "They told me about it over at the Chantry. And the good news doesn't end there. I discovered one of Arl Eamon's knights over at the Chantry, Ser Donall. I remember him from my childhood in Redcliffe. The arl is sick and has been for weeks now. The arlessa has them chasing rumors about the healing powers of the Ashes of Andraste over half of Ferelden. We need to get to Redcliffe and find out what is going on."

"Then that should be our first stop, I suppose," Rìona mused. "Providing you agree."

"Me? Agree? Well, yes, but... that's not necessary, you know."

Rìona stared at him. "You're the senior Grey Warden in our company. I assumed—"

"That I'd be in charge?" Alistair shook his head in alarm. "Oh, no."

"You expect _me_ to lead us?" she asked, her voice rising in disbelief. "I know almost nothing about being a Grey Warden, Alistair."

"You've been trained to lead people and I haven't. That's what you nobles do, right?"

"Well, yes," she said slowly, blinking in confusion. "I suppose, but—"

"Then you're the best person for the job," he declared with a firm nod. Then he smiled, looking relieved. "Glad we got that cleared up. I'll just... follow your lead and supply bits of Grey Warden lore whenever you're curious."

Rìona shook her head, feeling a terrible sense of unfairness at his dropping the burden of leading them upon her shoulders, but unable to pinpoint exactly how he was wrong. Perhaps he was merely astute enough to know his own limitations. There were worse things than a warrior with the wisdom to know he would not make a good leader. And yet he'd been Duncan's trusted protege. Would Duncan have recruited a Warden incapable of taking the initiative?

She was unspeakably sore and weary. It didn't seem worth it to argue the point, and so she let it slide. It soon became irrelevant, however, as Alistair's eyes finally took in the disarray of the room; the discarded armor and weapons, her shredded clothing and the half-dressed state in which he'd found her when he first came into the room.

She could see the thoughts go through his head. She saw the mistaken realization dawn in his face, saw his sickened, horrified look as he stared at her. She saw inquiries form upon his lips only to be discarded unspoken, one after the other. In that moment of comprehension, the way he saw her changed. Suddenly she was no longer the competent comrade whose leadership he was happy to follow, but instead something weak, delicate, injured, damaged...

Broken.

It was not to be borne, she thought angrily, feeling that rage ignite within her again. He could not leave the entire responsibility for leading them in her hands one moment and the next drown her in patronizing male solicitude.

"Don't, Alistair," she said quickly when he opened his mouth to speak. "Whatever you're thinking, you're wrong. That is not what happened here. I'm fine. Leave it at that."

"But—"

"Leave it, I said!" she snapped, strapping the baldric supporting the Cousland family sword around her chest. "Let's just... see to freeing this qunari Morrigan has found and get out of this bloody village. I've secured us lodgings in the barn of a freeholder near here for the night."

Alistair looked wounded at her sharp tone, but he took another look around the room and nodded grimly. Rìona lifted her head proudly and tried not to limp as he and Leliana fell in step behind her.


	10. Chapter Ten: Revelations, Part One

Alistair awoke with with a startled cry, his heart pounding and the archdemon's roar echoing in his ears. He blinked at the sloped slides of his tent as shadows moved across it in time with the creaking sway of the branches overhead, cast in relief by the flickering of the campfire. It was warm within his waxed-canvas shelter and he lingered long beyond the moment when awareness returned, dreading going out into the cold night to take his shift at watch.

He wasn't certain what time it was, but since he was awake, he decided he might as well go spell Rìona and let her get what sleep she could. Today she'd stumbled, nodding off on her feet as they trudged their way west toward Redcliffe. Considering that after her Joining she should be less likely to suffer fatigue, that worried him. He wondered if her nightmares of the archdemon were so severe that she wasn't sleeping well. Or perhaps it was because they had five people trying to cover six watch shifts, and she insisted that as their leader it was her place to take the extra watch shift every other day. Which meant that alone out of all of them, she never got a full night of rest.

Thinking of his fellow Grey Warden and single surviving comrade, he frowned unhappily. They had been getting along well until Lothering, the first awkward overtures of friendship having been made and accepted. Alistair had been revealing to her his—admittedly limited—knowledge about the Grey Wardens, and they'd shared some tentative confidences about themselves and their pasts. He'd told her about his life at the monastery and his childhood in Redcliffe, and he'd come close to disclosing his family history once or twice, knowing it was only a matter of time before he needed to reveal it to her. She had discussed some of her life back in Highever, though she didn't say much of the deaths of her family, other than to refer to them in passing when she sympathized with Alistair for the loss of his Grey Warden brothers. Things had been going just fine.

Until Lothering.

Alistair practically cringed with shame, thinking of the way he'd dumped the responsibility for leading them upon her. But she couldn't understand. She couldn't know how many times he'd been told that being in charge, or making decisions, was the absolute last thing he should ever attempt to do. She couldn't know just how precarious it had been for him with the fine line he had to tread. Had he been seen as taking initiative, or doing anything other than what he was ordered to do, he might have ended up imprisoned, or even dead. And now, with all that had happened since Ostagar, it was more important than ever before that he _not_ be seen as a potential leader.

But he'd chosen the worst possible time to do it. If he'd just opened his eyes a few minutes earlier and taken time to notice what had clearly happened in that room at the Lothering inn, he might have at least held off for a better time. Even with his purely theoretical knowledge of carnal matters, it had been impossible to misunderstand the situation, despite her denials. After what she had been through that day, for Alistair just to foist leadership upon her as he had... His timing was truly atrocious.

Things hadn't been the same between them since. She refused to talk about what had happened with Loghain's soldiers, and Alistair supposed it really wasn't any of his business, anyway. She merely clenched her bruised jaw and grimly took the reins of command into her hands, leading them to a freehold outside Lothering where she had found lodging for them in a barn. There, another apostate mage named Bethany had healed her injuries. Since then, Alistair could muster nothing more than the occasional solicitous inquiry into her well-being, which Rìona quickly brushed off. She no longer asked him about his past, or questioned him about being a Grey Warden. She no longer offered him insight into her own life, either. As the days of their journey passed, she grew ever more terse and distant.

Flipping back his blanket and bracing himself against the chill, Alistair donned the padded woolen arming doublet that went under his armor. He did not, however, attempt to put on the armor itself except for the chainmail hauberk. It turned out one of the soldiers Rìona had driven off in Lothering had left behind a set of veridium chainmail that fit Alistair fairly well. As a result, he had finally gotten something better than his rusty gray iron splintmail. The chainmail was easier to don but putting it on was such an awkward enough process to accomplish wide awake in the daylight; attempting it in a dark tent with his eyes still heavy with sleep would just be ridiculous.

To that end, a strange sort of platonic intimacy was developing among their company as they traveled. Rìona and Leliana often helped one another with their armor before they broke camp in the mornings, and one of them—more frequently Leliana as his fellow Grey Warden continued to be withdrawn—usually helped Alistair with the harder to reach buckles and ties. Sten, the qunari prisoner they had rescued from the cage in Lothering, disdained all help, which really surprised no one. Finding armor to fit him would have been a nightmare, but thankfully his gear—except, oddly enough, for any sort of sword or weapon—had been stored in a chest in the Lothering chantry and the revered mother had given it to Rìona along with the key to his cage. The revered mother said the templars had reported he'd been without a weapon when he was found.

Alistair had been used to receiving this sort of aid when traveling in the company of his fellow Grey Wardens, but none of _them_ had been female. He found himself struggling with an awareness that he hadn't often had to deal with before, either in the monastery or with the Grey Wardens. With Leliana it was easier to dismiss, since she'd been a cloistered sister, but with Rìona it was a bit more difficult. Which made him feel wretched because it was also extremely inappropriate: not only was she a comrade-in-arms, but considering what she'd been through in Lothering—despite her denials—those were the absolute last thoughts he should be thinking.

Refusing to let his mind go down that path, he gathered up his shield and the new sword they'd been given by the Chantry in Lothering as payment for performing a number of odd jobs posted on the Chanter's Board, which he had dubbed Oathkeeper. Leliana was capable of using a longsword, but was more proficient with a bow, and Sten preferred a greatsword, which they had scrounged up among the gear of some of the bandits they had dispatched, so the blade had fallen to Alistair. He hadn't mentioned that it resembled the sword Duncan had carried, but Rìona had caught him staring at it and he suspected she knew.

All told, despite the terrible things that had happened there, Lothering had been a profitable stop for them in many ways. It had netted them two new—admittedly bizarre—companions to aid in their efforts to stop the Blight and several pieces of armor and weapons that were better than they had possessed before.

Still, Alistair wasn't sure it had been worth the cost.

He pushed aside his tent flap and saw Rìona sitting huddled under a blanket on a log by the fire. Unlike Alistair, she wore no padded garments beneath her close-fitting leather with its bits of finely-wrought chain mesh, merely a linen undershirt. Her arms were covered by rerebraces and couters and vambraces, but beneath that strapped war skirt her legs were bare. Most nights he found her pacing around on her watch shift for warmth. Now, however, her chin was resting on her chest, and her eyes were half-lidded and drooping. They sprang open as he approached, a worried frown creasing his brow.

"It's not time for your watch yet," she said as he sat down beside her.

"Nightmares," he shrugged, and she nodded in understanding. "Besides, it looks like you could use some rest."

Rìona waved off his concern with a dismissive flap of her hand. "I'm fine."

"So you keep saying. But by this point after my Joining, I felt like I could march for days and not need sleep, and the past couple days you've been nodding off on your feet."

"It's nothing, really." She shook her head but she wouldn't meet his eyes.

"Maybe not, but I'm still concerned," he insisted. "I know you don't want to talk about what... _happened_ in Lothering, but if you've been injured, or—" Alistair's voice trailed of lamely as she turned a glare on him.

"What _happened_?" she hissed.

Alistair set his jaw determinedly, fighting the urge to back away from her ire. "Yes."

"Just what exactly is it you assume happened, Alistair?" Rìona asked softly, something cold and venomous in her tone.

He blushed, thanking the firelight for disguising it, and stammered. "Well, I... it seemed pretty obvious, given the state you were in."

"_What_ seemed obvious?"

Maker, was she going to make him say it?

"That you were, um... im—_imposed upon_."

She rolled her eyes. "Oh, Andraste's tits! Your mind is lurid enough to imagine it but Maker forbid you should actually speak the word aloud. You believe I was raped, despite the fact that I already told you I was not."

"Well... yes," he muttered.

"Tell me," she asked with deceptive casualness, "Do you think I've never been fucked before?"

His mouth fell open, and his face flamed again at that word. Sweet Andraste, he was  
stammering again, groping awkwardly for a response. "I... um... I hadn't given it much thought," he said finally. That was a lie, but it was better than admitting he'd spent enough time dwelling on the subject to have formulated a theory that, as the pampered daughter of a nobleman, she'd been all but cloistered pending marriage to someone of her station and was therefore as inexperienced as he himself was. Or that she had been, at least, until Lothering.

"Well allow me to assure you, I'm not some chaste or delicate damsel in need of rescue and coddling," she said sharply. "Even if I _had_ been 'imposed upon', which I was not, it changes nothing. What _happened_ in Lothering was that I took a near hopeless situation and turned it to my advantage. They were so preoccupied with the idea of sporting with me that they let down their guard, sparing me and possibly you the ordeal of swinging from Loghain's gallows. I was able to translate their distraction to victory. If you make it out that I've been irreparably damaged by it, or that I'm some fragile, traumatized victim, you take that victory from me and I will _not_ have that!"

"That's not what I was trying to do!" Alistair protested, affronted.

"Isn't it?" she glared at him, lifting an eyebrow in challenge.

"Look," he said impatiently. "All I'm saying is that as a Grey Warden, you should have _more_ energy and endurance, not less, and if you don't, it's because something isn't right."

Abruptly her shoulders slumped and Rìona sighed. "I know. And I thank you for your concern, but honestly, I am well on the mend from my run-in with Loghain's soldiers. There's no lasting injury, I promise you. And I'm... sorry I snapped. I understand you mean well, Alistair. I'll be fine, really."

It was on the tip of his tongue to point out that those were the words with which they had begun the conversation—they were no more informative now than they had been then—but he bit back the impulse. Her apology made this the closest thing they'd had to an amicable conversion since they'd left Lothering.

A long, pregnant silence fell between them, rife with the sense that there were things unsaid, things yearning to be spoken. But then, Alistair mused, it was rather unreasonable of him to expect that she would disclose everything when he was being less than forthcoming himself, wasn't it?

He opened his mouth to speak, on the verge of putting an end to his share of the withholding, at least, only to find himself saying something else entirely. "Now that I'm awake, you may as well get some rest. Sometimes I forget you're not used to this life, the travel and sleeping rough. Maybe that's why you're so tired all the time."

Her answer was barely audible as Rìona stared down at her feet. "Yes. I'm sure that must be it."

"You'll get used to it, in time. Why don't you let me take the extra watch shift tomorrow night? Don't give me that about you being the leader; our entire command structure isn't going to disintegrate just because you didn't take a watch shift one night."

Rìona rose and offered him a halfhearted smile. "Very well, then, I shan't argue. A full night's sleep will be nice. Thank you, and good night."

Her shoulders drooped wearily beneath the blanket she had wrapped around her as a cloak as she shuffled toward her tent. Alistair settled in on the fallen tree-trunk, frowning at the tent flap through which she had disappeared. Something wasn't right, he thought again, fretfully stroking the rune-marked ring he wore on one hand with the opposite thumb.

He didn't understand her, and couldn't fathom why Duncan had recruited her. Maker knew she was lovely, and a very pleasant person with whom to converse—when she wasn't being prickly, at least. Her skills with her bow were solid enough, and had improved since her Joining, but he'd seen her spar with Leliana and she was barely a step over mediocre with her daggers. Certainly that wasn't the sort of fighting expertise Duncan normally looked for in his recruits. She was a capable leader, he was relieved to discover, but that wasn't really surprising. She'd been raised to rule over people, after all, and the Couslands had a good name for managing their estates well; freeholders always spoke well of Highever. As a noblewoman, she also knew the ins and outs of Fereldan politics, something at which Alistair was completely—and quite deliberately—inept. Perhaps that was why Duncan had recruited her. It certainly wasn't for her vigor or stamina.

But then, she hadn't seemed quite so easily fatigued on their mission into the Korcari Wilds before her Joining. In fact, he'd been impressed with how well she'd handled herself in spite of her pampered upbringing and fighting inexperience. Ser Jory had begun pleading for a break long before she had admitted to any weariness. When exactly had her energy started to flag? Before or after her beating in Lothering? She'd been badly injured in the Tower of Ishal; one of that last wave of darkspawn had been charging her with a mace when Alistair went down, and Flemeth and Morrigan had both made mention of a head injury as being the reason she'd been unconscious for nearly three days. They had reached Lothering over two weeks after the battle at Ostagar, though. Surely she would have recovered fully by then, and certainly by now.

Perplexed, Alistair continued to stare at her tent as though willing it to provide answers. The tent, however, was not particularly forthcoming, and Alistair promised himself he'd keep a closer eye on his comrade in the days to come. 

* * *

Sten relieved him for the third watch shift, and Alistair slept soundly until he heard the sounds of Leliana humming and Morrigan grumbling about something. Rising reluctantly, he stepped out of his tent to see Rìona walking back into the clearing where they were camped, her face pale and tinged a greenish hue and her mouth drawn into a grimace as though plagued by a foul taste. She drank deeply from the water skin, but turned away with a shudder from the salted pork Leliana offered and nibbled upon a piece of bread instead. She would not look up so that he could get a good look at her face, but Alistair was almost certain her eyes were red-rimmed from crying.

She was silent and withdrawn during their walk that day, her eyes downcast. She ate a hearty supper and retired immediately to her tent, taking Alistair up on his offer to take her watch shift for the night. Leliana was clearly startled by the haste of Rìona's retreat into her tent; usually as their leader she made a point of checking in with everyone each night, getting to know them and making sure that all was well with each of them in turn. There were no such pleasantries this evening, however. She didn't even take the time to visit and play with her mabari as she always did.

He caught Morrigan looking at Rìona's tent with a perturbed expression before the witch turned and retreated to her own lean-to shelter, which she had erected away from where the rest of them were encamped.

His watch shift fell last that night, and so he was awake when the others began stirring the next morning. He had already used some of the oats they had purchased in Lothering to start a porridge simmering—much to Leliana's shuddering dismay—and was warming slices of salted pork on a rock at the edge of the firepit when Rìona emerged. He saw her turn green as she inhaled the aroma of the sizzling meat and she dashed for the edge of the clearing, unable even to make it fully out of sight before she bent behind a tree, retching upon the ground.

He heard Leliana give a soft gasp and turned to see her staring after his fellow Warden in shock. The minstrel-turned-lay sister grabbed up a water skin and a heel of bread and followed Rìona without another word. Alistair watched as she crouched beside Rìona, wrapping a soothing arm around the young noblewoman's shaking shoulders. Presently they returned to the campfire, though Rìona stayed well upwind of the cooking salt pork as she wiped her wet face on the back of her hands.

Alistair opened his mouth and she immediately glared at him. "Do _not_ ask if I'm all right."

Unable to string together a series of words that wasn't in some way a paraphrase of that exact inquiry, Alistair said nothing.

In ideal conditions, traveling on the main roads, the journey from Lothering to Redcliffe would have taken about four days. But they were avoiding the roads, in case Loghain's troops were hunting for them, and in addition to the uphill climb, there were places where the rains had made the earth boggy, so the trip would likely take them well over a week. As they drew nearer to the town on the southern shore of Lake Calenhad, Alistair found himself growing more anxious. Not only was he concerned over the news of Arl Eamon's illness, he was now thinking it might be worth suggesting that Rìona be seen by a healer. Not that there was likely to be a healing mage in Redcliffe, but perhaps at least there might be an apothecary or physician.

He regretted shrugging off the burden of leading them and laying it upon her more than ever. Rìona was unwell, that much was certain; if she got any worse, she'd be in no condition to lead them at all. He was going to have to find a way to make himself start shouldering some more of that responsibility, at least until she started feeling better.

He had expected another day of withdrawn silence from his fellow Warden, but after they broke camp and were underway, her mood seemed, if not to brighten, then at least to approach something akin to calm resignation. The change became apparent when they paused for the midday meal. He saw Morrigan approach Rìona, though he was too far away to hear what they said to one another. The two had often spoken together since Morrigan had come out of the Korcari Wilds in their company. Alistair couldn't fathom what they had to talk about, especially given how prone to irascibility the witch was, but Rìona spent no less time getting to know Morrigan than she had any of the rest of their company. Still, this was the first time he'd seen the apostate mage take the initiative in starting a conversation.

Whatever Morrigan said to her, Rìona shook her head in what was clearly a denial. Looking put out, the witch argued, but Rìona again apparently refused whatever Morrigan was proposing. Something resembling peace came over his fellow Warden's expression as she did so. She spoke softly to Morrigan, and Alistair noted the increasing frustration with which Morrigan received her words. The witch's reply was sharp enough for him to make out.

"You are being a fool!" she spat and stalked away from Rìona, who stared pensively after her, then sighed and turned away.

Taking his courage in both hands, Alistair approached her. "What was that about?"

"Nothing. Morrigan was merely offering me a potion."

"You know I'm not overflowing with trust where Morrigan is concerned, but if it will make you feel better, wouldn't it be a better idea to just take it?"

Rìona smiled gently and shrugged. "Perhaps I should. But I won't, and I have my reasons for that. Don't worry, Alistair. I'll be well enough."

It was a strange turnaround, watching the young noblewoman go from such distress to an almost contented state, if not actual joy. He was still puzzling over her moods when he ducked into his tent that evening. When he jolted awake from his nightmare hours later to find she hadn't awoken him to take his watch shift, his confusion returned full force.

He emerged expecting to find her asleep but her eyes were wide open, her hands folded over her abdomen, as she stared off into the campfire with a slight smile on her face.

"Why didn't you get me up for my watch?" he asked.

"Is it that late already?" Rìona asked, blinking distractedly at the sky. "I'm sorry. I must have lost track of time while I was thinking. Maker, it's almost time for third watch, isn't it?"

He found himself once more speaking the stupidest, and possibly most oft-repeated, words in his repertoire. "Are you—"

"All right?" she said, turning that distant smile upon him. "Yes, I rather think I shall be."

Finally it was Alistair who looked away, unsure what to say and wary of provoking her ire again. When she made no effort to go to her tent and claim some sleep for herself, he darted a cautious sideways glance in her direction. She was staring into the fire once more, that strange half-smile still upon her face. Seeing it, Alistair was struck by how lovely she was. It was easier to ignore that fact when she was being irritable and snappish, but now, cast in the vermilion glow of the campfire, it was all too noticeable. Her narrow chin and high cheekbones made her look fragile, but he'd seen her fight: there was steel in her, hidden beneath all that softly glowing, delicate ivory skin. Somehow that made her all the more attractive.

Under the weight of his gaze, she turned her attention back to him, and something in her smile changed. The way her eyes narrowed and her lips curved up was knowing, almost predatory, as though she was well aware of what he'd been thinking. Suddenly Alistair felt uneasy.

The tip of her tongue touched her upper lip for a long, thoughtful moment as she cocked her head to one side and stared at him, squinting as though studying him closely. He was on the verge of making a joke to break the suddenly-threatening silence when she finally spoke.

"Sten should be awake for his turn at watch soon, and I find I'm not at all tired for once. Perhaps I'm being forward, but would you care to join me in my tent?"

Alistair choked, coughing as he stared at her in alarm. "_What?_" He cleared his throat, trying to bring his voice down to a somewhat more dignified, or at least masculine, register. "I mean... your tent? Are you serious?"

"Yes," she replied casually, as though she'd offered him a cup of tea rather than... that. "You'll forgive me, but you remind me of someone I've been thinking about a great deal tonight, and I find I really would rather not pass the night alone."

"I don't—! Why would you—?" Alistair ran a hand over his hair, pulling on the braided queue behind his head in frustration. "Maker's blood, your moods are going to be the death of me, I swear it!"

Rìona blinked at him, surprised by his sudden vehemence. "I beg your pardon?"

"Ever since Lothering you've barely wanted to hear from me, and now you're asking me something like _this_?" He stared at her incredulously. "I mean, you're a beautiful girl—woman—and I'm sure there are many men who would jump at a chance like this, and maybe I'm mad for not doing so myself, but... I rather think I would like it to mean something."

Then it was Rìona's turn to stare, her eyes wide with astonishment. "You've never—"

Alistair cut her off before she could complete her sentence and put the seal on his humiliation. "Never what? Had a good pair of shoes?"

"Never been with a woman," she said bluntly, giving him a slightly quelling look.

Alistair groaned, looking up at the sky and hoping the firelight disguised his blush. "Fine, then. No, I've _never._ Life in the Chantry isn't exactly suited for rambunctious boys, you know."

"Andraste's mercy!" she breathed, shaking her head in disbelief. "I suppose I should have guessed. But you were recruited, what? Seven, eight months ago? All that time at the Warden compound in Denerim and you never found the opportunity?"

"Well, it's not something I take lightly, right?" he retorted, feeling his shoulders stiffen defensively. "I'd rather like to think I'm trying to be a gentleman. I mean, wouldn't you want a gentleman to court you... if you were to be courted, that is?"

She shook her head again, something bitter tightening the line of her lips. "I... suppose that would be an interesting change of pace. Well. Forget I mentioned anything, Alistair. I'm sorry, I really don't know what has come over me tonight."

"I suppose you've been... _courted_ a lot."

Her eyes grew distant. "Not really, even if sometimes it seems that way. Though, comparatively speaking..."

"Yes, yes." Alistair rolled his eyes as she offered him a teasing smile. "I guess it was too much to hope you wouldn't make fun of me about it."

"I'm not making fun, Alistair, truly," Rìona said sincerely. "I suppose it's all a bit gallant, even. Yours just... isn't a mindset to which I'm terribly accustomed."

"I thought you noblewomen were supposed to have been brought up all... dainty and demure!"

"Oh, you might be surprised at the level of decadence to be found amongst the nobility," she murmured, something sad chasing across her face.

"Then again, perhaps not," he corrected, drawing a deep, hissing breath between clenched teeth. "I mean, I told you how I was a bastard, right? How my mother was a serving girl in Castle Redcliffe and the arl took me in after she died?"

Rìona nodded. "Yes."

"Well, what I didn't mention at the time—and I guess you really ought to know this—is that my father was King Maric."

She stared at him. Stared, with her shocked expression and wide, round eyes, her mouth open in a soft O of amazement.

And then she began to laugh.

Confused, Alistair watched as she laughed; loud, ringing peels of merriment echoed through the clearing, until he heard Leliana begin to grumble inside her tent. Tears began to stream down her face as she clutched her middle, giggling hysterically.

She was mad, Alistair thought glumly, as a growl emitted from Sten's tent. That's all there was to it.

"So!" She wiped at her cheeks while gasping for air. "You're not just a bastard, but a royal bastard?"

He didn't even have a chance to respond with something witty before she doubled over with another bout of laughter.

It was some time before she was able to draw her next breath, and when she did, she asked, "_You_ are Cailan's half-brother?"

"Yesss..." Alistair answered slowly.

Her shoulders jerked with restrained laughter. "Of course you are!" she cried, and then she was off again.

Alistair sighed.

Absolutely barking mad.


	11. Chapter Eleven: Morale

Fate, it seemed, would not be content to allow Rìona to go very long without some living reminder of Cailan, and of her foolish and failed schemes.

She'd been utterly distraught when she had realized she carried the king's child, which she knew it must be, since she'd been careful with Duncan and Daveth. At first, she'd thought to rid herself of it but, when Morrigan had come to her and offered a concoction intended to do just that, Rìona had found herself unable to do so. This babe was not only the last of the Cousland line, but also the last of the Theirin dynasty... or so Rìona had believed until Alistair made his confession. Strange, that she should give up her ambitions for the throne only to find herself carrying the royal heir. When they finally confronted and toppled Teyrn Loghain, she would be duty-bound to attempt to secure her child's birthright.

But then Alistair had admitted who his own father was. He was still miffed with her for her reaction, and she would need to smooth things over with him, but the irony had simply been too intense to bear in that moment. She had come away from Ostagar not only with the king's babe in her belly, but with his half-brother at her side. Little wonder she'd found herself reminded of Cailan; she'd been an idiot not to realize what the resemblance between Alistair and the dead king signified much sooner. Why else would the Arl of Redcliffe have troubled himself to see to the rearing of a dead chambermaid's bastard son?

When she had finally caught her breath enough to ask questions, Alistair had disavowed being the heir to the throne. It seemed he'd been told all his life that taking the throne was the last thing he would be expected to do. Now, Rìona better understood his reluctance to assume command of their growing band of adventurers. If Alistair led the endeavor to bring down Loghain, it would be seen as a bid for the throne.

He didn't seem to understand—or perhaps he was simply not yet reconciled to—the fact that such an outcome was nearly inevitable. As Cailan's offspring, Rìona's babe was slightly ahead of Alistair in the succession, but even if Rìona could prove her claim of royal paternity, the Landsmeet would never agree to put a babe on the throne and assign a regent when an adult heir was to be had, especially when Ferelden needed leadership against the Blight. Leaving Loghain in the regency was absolutely out of the question, given his crimes. And Cailan's widow, Queen Anora, was Loghain's daughter; they had to assume she was complicit in her father's schemes to usurp the throne.

Which left Alistair as the strongest candidate for the crown—unless Arl Eamon wished to make a claim of his own by right of being the king's uncle, which Alistair assumed he would.

Rìona wasn't so certain.

Now she found herself in the presence of yet another of Cailan's relatives—his other uncle, Teagan Guerrin, Bann of Rainesfere. Bann Teagan was the younger brother of Arl Eamon and the late Queen Rowan, Cailan's mother. He'd come to Redcliffe after Loghain had declared himself Queen Anora's regent, in order to ascertain the status of his older brother's illness, but had found himself unable to gain entry to the castle. Then the attacks had begun.

"Walking corpses?" Rìona repeated in confusion,as he explained what had been happening in Redcliffe these last few days.

"Indeed," the bann replied, pacing in agitation at the front of the Redcliffe village chantry, where he had established his command center. The chantry was the sturdiest and most secure building in the village, and the last line of defense should the militia fail to defend them. "Three nights now, they've surged forth from the castle at sunset and attacked until dawn. The knights and militia have been able to beat them back, but several villagers have been dragged off to their deaths."

"Dragged off?"

"Yes. We think they may have been eaten."

"Maker's breath!" Alistair exclaimed.

"Each night the attacks have gotten worse. If that continues to hold true, tonight will be the worst yet. The militia barely managed to prevail last night and lost several men in the process. I think tonight there is little hope, unless... I realize that the role of the Grey Wardens is to fight the darkspawn and the Blight, but if you will not help us, I fear Redcliffe will be lost entirely."

Morrigan made a derisive sound. "'Tis a pointless waste of time, risking our lives to defend grubby villagers when we ought to be seeking our enemies and defeating them."

"We won't get far against Teyrn Loghain without the arl!" Alistair snapped at her.

"I fail to see how this helps us fight the Blight," Sten rumbled. "Why are we delaying here, when we should be moving toward the archdemon?"

"For a member of the qunari vanguard, you know surprisingly little about strategy," Rìona answered, looking up at the giant. "We cannot gather an army without the support of the Arl of Redcliffe. We cannot reach, much less defeat, the archdemon without an army to help us fight our way through the horde of thousands of darkspawn that inevitably surround him."

The qunari made a disgruntled sound, but desisted. Morrigan looked as though she would continue to protest, but subsided at Rìona's challenging stare. The silence was not to last long, however.

After agreeing to help defend the village, Bann Teagan requested that they confer with the mayor regarding any aid they might render the militia in their preparations. From Mayor Murdock, Rìona learned that the blacksmith, Owen, had locked himself away inside the smithy. He refused to repair any of the armor or weapons the militia was using, though after so many nights of fighting, they were desperately in need. His daughter, Owen explained, was a maid in the castle and Murdock had refused to enter the castle and search for her. He would not relent and perform the repairs until Rìona had given her word that she would enter the castle as soon as the village was secure and look for the girl.

This prompted Morrigan to begin making snide remarks about rescuing kittens from trees.

There was also a dwarven trader named Dwyn, a combat veteran whose aid would have been quite valuable to the militia, who had instead locked himself in his house to wait out the battle. Rìona sought him out to entreat his assistance, but found reasoning with him much more difficult than she had originally envisioned. He wanted to be paid for his services, but she had no coin to spare. From his appraising look, she thought he might be amenable to payment of a different kind, but the presence of her companions kept her from offering sexual favors. Finally, she promised to speak to Bann Teagan and Arl Eamon about lowering the dwarf's taxes and duties for conducting his business on their lands. For this, Dwyn agreed to add his expertise to the defense of the village.

Then it was Sten's turn to grumble that Rìona wouldn't allow him to bash the dwarf's head in for cowardice, despite the fact that doing so would have defeated the purpose in recruiting him to help defend the village in the first place.

With each new illogical argument, Rìona found herself becoming more and more irritable that they did not seem to be capable of understanding the finer points of diplomacy. Alistair and Leliana were supportive, thank the Maker, but unless Morrigan and Sten learned to trust her leadership, there was going to be a confrontation sooner or later.

It was the misfortune of the proprietor of the village tavern that he happened to find himself the target of Rìona's frustration. Neither the barkeep nor the serving wench were in evidence when their company entered the inn seeking rooms and a hot meal before the battle. When Rìona asked some of the militia members, sitting in the common room seeking their courage in a pint of ale before darkness fell, one of them hooked a careless thumb over his shoulder at the storeroom behind the bar.

"Ol' Lloyd's prob'ly got Bella pinned in there trying to worm his chubby hand up under her skirts," the rough-clad villager slurred.

Leaving her companions, Rìona went to the storeroom to find the prediction was only too accurate.

"Get your greasy hands off me, you pig!" she heard a feminine voice hiss in a commoner's accent.

"I gave you this job, missy. I can take it away just as easy, if you don't play nice," a male voice replied. There was a pained grunt, and a moment later the pretty serving wench appeared, her face flushed and her eyes snapping angrily.

"Oh!" she said, nearly walking into Rìona before she noticed her standing there because she was too busy trying to repair the disarray of her clothing. "Sorry. If you want ale, you'll have to talk to Lloyd. He's got a vise grip on the spigots. Other than that, what can I get for you, love?"

"Meals and rooms for myself and my four companions, if you have them to spare," Rìona said politely.

"We got rooms," the girl nodded. "Only one staying in the inn right now is some elf, creepy fellow named Berwick. Says he's waiting for his brother. Redcliffe's not exactly overflowing with visitors these days."

"Well, we'll see what we can do about that," Rìona said, offering the girl a reassuring smile. "Just tell me Lloyd's a better cook than he is an employer."

"Never fear, love, I'm the one what does the cooking around here, and since I do the marketing as well, you can be sure you're getting actual mutton and not the contents of the rat-catcher's nets. Drives Lloyd mad, the expense does, but until he gets off his lazy arse to go to the market himself, that'll be the way of it. Besides, not like he can't afford it, charging desperate men for ale when they're likely facing their last sundown tonight defending him and his tavern."

"He's charging the militia for ale?" Rìona asked incredulously.

"That swine would charge Andraste herself for the fagot that lit her own pyre." The girl nodded, ladling stew into bowls while she spoke. "And then he cowers in his cellar and can't even be bothered to help defend the village, if you can believe it. Won't go to the chantry like the rest of the folk, because he's afraid the militia will break into his tavern and steal his ale. As if they don't have more important things to do than ransack the swill Lloyd serves, fighting those things coming down from the castle!"

Rìona shook her head in disgust. "Sounds like you need a better job."

"I'll just end up in another place like this, or worse," Bella shrugged. "Lloyd may grope me, but he hasn't got the bollocks to do more than that, and a sharp elbow to the ribs always puts him back in his place, which is more than you can say for some men. Anyway, I'd better get back to work. He'll be out of the storeroom once he's done having his wank, you can count on it."

Sure enough, the rotund barkeep appeared moments later, still flushed and sweating.

Moments later, Rìona sheathed her dagger as she sat down on a bench across the trestle table from Alistair, who was looking at her in disbelief.

"Did you _honestly_ just threaten to kill the barkeep if he didn't serve the militia free ale?"

"No, I threatened to kill him if he didn't go help defend the village with the rest of the militia tonight. Then I put Bella in charge of the tavern and asked _her_ to serve the militia free ale."

"I'm not sure we're supposed to do things like that."

"Well, fortunately for us, we're the only two Grey Wardens in Ferelden. In the absence of a guiding voice, we get to make up the rules as we go along." At his dubious look, she sighed, and gestured to the militiamen as they cheered Bella for bringing them foaming tankards of fresh ale. "Alistair, look at those men over there. They're not trained knights, hardened to warfare. They're frightened peasants defending their homes from a horrific threat they don't understand. If a pint of ale is going to give them the courage they need to stand and fight beside us tonight, then I'm going to do everything in my power to make certain they get it. If worse comes to worst, at least they'll have enjoyed a final tankard before they go to the Fade, and perhaps come tomorrow there will be one less pig trying to force himself on the helpless barmaid." She shrugged, lifting a spoonful of rich mutton stew from a trencher made from the hollowed-out crust of a stale loaf of bread. "Besides, Bella gave us our rooms for the night for free as well. Of course, if your conscience is too outraged by my tactics, you're welcome to sleep on the cold ground outside."

Alistair had no reply for that, but instead turned his attention to his own stew. Rìona looked at her other companions to see if they would challenge her decision as well, only to find Morrigan giving her an approving smile and Sten nodding in satisfaction.

At least she'd managed to do something right in their estimation. 

* * *

With Rìona's encouragement, her companions sought their rooms to sleep for a while before sundown, for it would no doubt be a long night. She found herself unable to rest despite her exhaustion. Although there had been several skirmishes along the road since they had reached Lothering, this was the first battle since Ostagar that she'd had time to anticipate, and she was unnerved by it.

They were looking to her for leadership, but she was neither a general nor a particularly good strategist. She'd learned to use a bow, because a teyrn was expected to be able to fight beside their banns and freeholders in time of conflict. Other nations coddled and sheltered their nobility, but in Ferelden the nobles ruled by the respect and will of the freeholders, who chose the most able fighters to lead them in war. At one time, that requirement might have excluded noblewomen, but the Orlesian occupation had changed things, with Queen Moira and Lady Rowan, later Queen Rowan, taking up arms as well.

Still, warfare was not her strength. Rìona was trained to be a politician and diplomat, albeit a rather unusual one, relying nearly as much on her sensual nature as her glib tongue. She was not meant to lead troops in battle; that had always been Fergus's intended role. Now, tonight, that leadership would be put to the test, and she could not rest for thinking of all that might go wrong with such an unqualified general leading the battle.

Inevitably, her thoughts traveled back to those last few desperate hours before the battle at Ostagar. She thought of Cailan and their frenzied coupling on the rug in his tent, the bite of his armor into her flesh and the pleasure which had come unbidden. She understood now the desire that had driven the king that night; had there been a likely candidate among her party, she might have sought him out, to release some of the anxious tension brewing within her. This was perhaps especially true in the wake of the shock she'd received in realizing she was pregnant. She wished to prove that her body was still her own, to be used at her own discretion and desire.

And so Rìona found herself restless, pacing her room above the tavern rather than sleeping as she had intended. Outside she could hear the clanging of the blacksmith's hammer, and the shouts of men as they scurried around the village preparing for battle, practicing with their bows, donning what little armor they possessed. Finally, she surrendered to the fact that sleep was a futile endeavor and left her room.

The militiamen were fewer in the tavern now, having drunk up their courage. The barmaid Bella was cleaning tables and asked if Rìona needed anything, but Rìona declined and left the tavern instead. As she walked into the crisp, overcast afternoon, she was nearly trampled by a frantic girl looking for her younger brother. Before she knew it, Rìona had agreed to help with the search and set off to search down by the docks, while the girl went up the trail to the windmill to check around there. It was as good a task as any to keep her occupied in the absence of a lover, and this way Morrigan and Sten need never know she was expending effort on a profitless gesture of no strategic importance.

Few buildings on the docks were occupied; most of the village men were helping the militia, either preparing to fight themselves, or aiding those who would. The women and children were already seeking shelter in the chantry. The general store was abandoned, its proprietor having been killed the first night the village was attacked. It was there Rìona found casks of lamp oil. She remembered the way Ser Gilmore and the knights had dragged furniture into the passageways of Castle Cousland and set it ablaze, creating flaming barricades to deter the advance of Howe's invading forces. She resolved to speak with Ser Perth about it and see if the oil might be put to some strategic use. For the first time since she'd agreed to help defend the village, she felt she was contributing something other than acting as a persuasive intermediary.

She found the lad, Bevin, hiding in a wardrobe in his own home. He'd come seeking his grandfather's sword, determined to prove his bravery to his sister. Rìona convinced him to return to his sister's care in the chantry, and took the sword he'd been seeking from its chest, studying it. It was a well-made longsword, and valuable as well, if the gold chasing around the hilt was any indication. But the one Alistair had gotten in Lothering was nearly as fine, and no one else among their company had need of such a sword. She thought of their dire financial situation and briefly considered selling it, but she felt the weight of the Cousland family sword upon her back and knew she could not. She took the sword to Bevin and his sister in the chantry and gently pressed it into the girl's hands, exhorting her to keep it, or at least sell it herself if she had need of the funds.

Again, she could just imagine Morrigan's mockery of such a simple act of decency. It was getting harder and harder to find ways to like the contentious witch. Rìona thought they had been making some progress since leaving the Korcari Wilds. Morrigan seemed to have approved of the way Rìona had dispatched the soldiers in Lothering, and she had been pleased that Rìona hadn't reacted in horror to seeing Morrigan draw magical power from sex. They actually seemed to have come close to striking up something of—if not a friendship, then at least an understanding.

But since Rìona had refused Morrigan's offer of an abortifacient, the apostate mage had become far more scathing in her attitude toward Rìona and her decisions as their leader. Morrigan had made a persuasive argument for why Rìona was being foolish to attempt to lead them against the Blight with a babe in her belly, but in the end it hadn't mattered. She simply would not do it. From that moment on, Morrigan had little tolerance for Rìona. It almost seemed as though she wished to see if she could drive Rìona away from their company.

Sten's arguments, at least, Rìona could understand. He didn't grasp the subtleties of the politics behind warfare. But Morrigan's derision seemed to be fueled by nothing more than spite. Rìona did not consider herself an excessively altruistic person, but there was much to be gained by aiding in the defense of the village, in terms of the political and military aid Bann Teagan and Arl Eamon could render their cause.

Her willingness to assist the village seemed to please Alistair, at least. And that approval made her happier than she cared to admit, especially now that she understood who he was. It had been all well and good to invite him to her tent, before she realized that he was the half-brother of the man she'd set out to seduce to win a place on the throne. But now such an entanglement—and once she understood Alistair's views on the matter, she knew it could be nothing less than an entanglement—was simply out of the question. It didn't matter how beautiful she found him, or that watching him fight was enough to leave her weak-kneed and breathless. It didn't matter that his resemblance to Cailan evoked erotic memories of the pleasure she'd experienced even in the midst of such tumult. She simply could not become involved with the bastard heir to the Fereldan throne, not after all she had done.

"...doesn't matter anyway," she heard a glum voice say. "It's not like we're going to live out the night."

Tomas, she thought, recognizing the voice. The red-haired young man who had met them on the road leading into the village and taken them to Bann Teagan. He'd stuck in her mind because the color of his hair had reminded her of Ser Gilmore.

"Eh, lad, don't let me hear you talkin' like that," a deeper, gruffer voice chided. "We got Grey Wardens helping us now. The Warden's done got ol' Owen repairing our armor and even talked Dwyn into helping with the defense. Never fear, lad. You might just have a chance to know the touch of a woman yet!"

She came around the corner of one of the dockside buildings to see a small cluster of men gathered, the casks of oil she'd found in the general store on the wooden planks beside them. Clearly they were tasked by Ser Perth to retrieve the oil and were taking a short rest before hauling it up the hill.

"Good afternoon, good sers," she said, forcing a smile to her lips. She looked at the red-headed lad, whose face was fit to match his hair.

"Good afternoon, Warden," the men replied, some bowing politely, others merely nodding.

"If you weren't aware, there's free ale for the militia at the tavern," she informed them. "I don't recommend going into battle drunk, but a tankard is the very least the gallant defenders of Redcliffe deserve to brace themselves for the coming battle."

A chorus of thanks greeted her pronouncement, and Rìona let her eyes travel slowly from one man to the next until she had taken each of them in. They were a rough, common lot, a far cry from the knights and noblemen she'd always expected would be the recipient of her attentions. But they were also to a man hale and healthy from a life of productive labor. Farmers, millers, shipwrights and builders, all.

"Come tomorrow evening," she declared with a flirtatious grin, "I intend to be back in that tavern, and I plan to have a dance with each and every one of you, barring those who will be home celebrating our victory with their wives. I do hope none of you will disappoint me." She turned her gaze upon the blushing lad. "You _will_ be there to dance with me, won't you, Tomas?"

"Y-y-yes, my lady—Warden," the young man stammered, turning an even more brilliant hue. She spared him a final smile and walked away.

"Come on, let's get these casks up to Ser Perth!" she heard him say as she rounded the corner. A grunt followed as he lifted one. "I don't know about you fellows, but I've got a lady to dance with tomorrow!"

With the boisterous laughter and ribbing of the men echoing in her ears, Rìona made her way back to the inn to retrieve her bow and her companions and to take her station for the battle to come.


	12. Chapter Twelve: Triumph

**A/N:** DragonReine from DeviantArt and the People Of Thedas community at Dreamwidth has been doing some gorgeous artwork for selected chapters of _Elysium_ which you can check out in the chapter posts at DreamWidth (link in my profile.)

_Nock an arrow. Draw. Release._

Rìona sighted her next target. Bann Teagan had not been in error when he described these creatures as walking corpses, but these had the look of things long dead, the putrid purple-brown, rotting flesh that could only be the result of months of decay. Where had they come from? Nothing in the castle could possibly have been dead for long enough to make such a thing; the castle had only been closed off for three days. Well, four now, with dawn looming on the horizon.

_Nock an arrow. Draw. Release._

Were they the knights and guards and servants who had been within Castle Redcliffe? But if so, how could they be so decomposed? Surely there were no old corpses lying around the castle. Anyone who had died there would have been properly burned during their funeral rites.

How was this possible?

_Nock. Draw. Release._

That arrow found its home in the neck of a creature charging toward Alistair's back while he engaged another, spinning it around where it froze under Morrigan's ice spell, and then was shattered by another arrow from Leliana's bow. Above the swarming mass of men and monsters fighting, the qunari Sten towered, roaring something in his tongue as he swung his greatsword and almost casually lopped the head off another of the creatures. To her left, Rìona heard the gravely voice of Mayor Murdock and knew he still lived. On the other side of the village square, the light of the bonfire reflected on short red locks and she knew the young villager Tomas, with whom she had promised to dance in celebration, also still lived, loosing arrow after arrow into the monsters attacking them. To her right, the barkeep Lloyd's corpulent form lay still upon the ground, his long butcher's knife clutched tightly in his fist. A vicious gash split him from hip to sternum, nearly disemboweling him. She supposed she ought to feel badly about that, as she had been the one who had compelled him to join the militia in defending the village, but she could not.

_Nock. Draw. Release._

It became a mantra in her mind, compelling her to reach over her shoulder and pull the next arrow from the etched-leather quiver that was becoming more and more depleted. Her arms were sore and weary from the prolonged battle, which had begun just after sundown. There had been no reprieve, though the waves of creatures came less frequently and were sparser the longer the night drew on. Now the sky was that strange dark gray of the predawn hour, and it looked as though this wave would be eliminated before the next wave struck.

"I'm done with you now!" She heard Alistair yell, his voice annoyed. He thrust his sword through the final creature still standing, so that the point emerged through its back, and then kicked it away, sliding the blade out of its midsection. It fell to the ground with a sickening, squelching sound, and rose no more.

They waited, swords and bows ready, for the next wave of creatures to arrive. The sky continued to lighten and still nothing else came at them. Slowly, swords began to droop, bows began to sink down to the sides of their bearers. Rìona found her arms shaking and she, too, released the draw on her bowstring and stood there on the steps of the chantry, tense and waiting.

Far off, from the top of the cliff, they heard a sound rising. A shout. No, a cheer. Ser Perth's knights, who had been battling the creatures coming across the bridge from the castle, were cheering.

A moment later, the entire village square was filled with triumphant shouts and whoops, as the men of the militia tossed down their swords and bows, embracing each other, clapping one another on the back. Rìona found herself swept up in the embrace of someone—she knew not whom—wearing rough homespun. An enthusiastic kiss was pressed to her cheek, and then she was released to stagger upon her own feet once more. She dropped her bow and slumped against one of the rough-hewn wooden beams supporting the overhang that covered the entrance to the chantry.

The scene was repeated many more times. Forgetting themselves in the joy of having survived, the defenders of the village forgot to treat her with the cautious reverence they had when she had arrived yesterday. She saw Alistair also receiving congratulatory hugs and thumps on the back. Leliana beamed as she someone bestowed upon her a hearty buss on the cheek and congratulated the giver sweetly. Only Sten and Morrigan stood apart, but even Sten looked satisfied with the night's work, his arms crossed over his chest and his stern visage softened somewhat in approval. Morrigan glowered at anyone who seemed they would come too close or attempt to embrace her.

Rìona shook her head in bemusement and received another joyous embrace. Behind her, the massive doors to the chantry opened and Bann Teagan emerged, sheathing his sword. A smile wreathed his face as he saw how many survivors still stood in the green of the village square. He bowed respectfully before Rìona and she returned the gesture with a smile.

Rising from the bow, however, was more difficult. Her head spun dizzily; and she found herself swaying and leaned against the wooden beam once again.

"Are you well, my lady?" the bann asked, respectfully.

"I am, my lord bann," she said, closing her eyes wearily for a moment until the spinning stopped. "It's been a long night, however. I suspect we're all of us quite exhausted."

"Yes, you're quite right," the bann nodded. "I had thought we would attempt to enter the castle as soon as we've held a service for the dead, but now I think better of the idea. It would be best for your company, and the knights of Redcliffe, to get some rest and be refreshed to confront whatever menace still lurks inside the castle. I shall declare this a day of rest and thanksgiving for the village, and plan to enter the castle at first light tomorrow."

"Do you think there will be another onslaught of these creatures tonight?" Rìona asked.

"We shall stand ready at sundown, just in case. But every previous attack ended with the creatures retreating back to the castle at dawn's first light. This night, you have slain them all and there are none left to return to the castle and regroup." The bann frowned at the decayed corpses lying scattered throughout the village. "We shall burn these. Unless whatever is in the castle somehow manages to create more from thin air, I do not see how there could be another attack."

"So be it," Rìona agreed.

She stood near the bann as he made a speech before the townsfolk, celebrating their victory and commemorating those who had fallen. Then the militia sought their beds, while the able-bodied amongst the townsfolk who had sought shelter in the chantry tended to the bodies of the dead. The members of the militia who had died would be set adrift upon the lake on burning rafts after the funeral rites had been held. There was some debate as to whether or not there should be rites for the undead creatures which had attacked them, since they did not know whether the creatures had once been people. But in the interest of disposing of the bodies before they became a sanitation issue—or decided to come back to life, as Alistair so disquietingly interjected, and Rìona didn't think he was entirely joking—it was decided Mother Hannah would speak a blessing over the decomposed corpses and then they would be burnt straightaway.

After arranging to convene before sundown to watch the castle for signs of another attack, Rìona and her companions trudged up the hill to the tavern, all but Sten slumped with exhaustion. Bella, Maker bless her, had breakfast laid out and kettles of water boiling for baths. Rìona tucked into the porridge eagerly enough, but when a platter of sizzling sausages was brought to the table, she quickly bolted before the odor could overwhelm her, dashing outside to gulp deep, refreshing breaths of the cool morning air.

Presently, Leliana appeared, bringing a cup of warm broth and another bowl of porridge. Rìona accepted it gratefully and broke her fast in the fresh air outside the inn.

"Alistair is worried about you, you know," the Orlesian minstrel said softly, sitting companionably beside Rìona.

"Yes, I know."

"You must tell him, sooner or later, no?"

"I know I must," Rìona nodded, her eyes downcast. "It's only... I've done some regrettable things, Leliana. And perhaps the greatest of my sins was carried out against the father of my babe. It was necessary. I see that now, though I didn't understand it at the time. But no matter how necessary it may have been, what came of it is something that Alistair may never be able to forgive. It resulted in the destruction of all he loved, and may very well end up forcing him to be something he doesn't want to be."

Leliana shook her head. "Surely it cannot be as bad as all that!"

"You think not? You think the fate of a nation, perhaps of an entire continent, cannot hinge on one ill-considered affair?" Rìona sighed, looking out over the village to Lake Calenhad beyond. "There is no greater force in all this world than desire, Leliana. For desire have kingdoms risen and fallen. It shapes destinies, drives men to ends to which they never imagined they would go, drives them mad. 'There is little to nothing in all of Thedas that cannot be had for some well-applied fellatio.' The courtesans of Antiva know this."

She had thought the minstrel might laugh, but instead Leliana hummed thoughtfully. "You are right, of course. I know this better than you might think. I, too, have seen the destruction wrought by desire and madness."

"More of your mysterious past, before you became a lay-sister of the chantry?" Rìona asked, without any real intent to pry. Leliana had consistently rebuffed any questions about her past, and Rìona had far too many secrets of her own to feel entitled to press for more information.

"You know of the courtesans of Antiva. Surely, then, you are familiar with the bards of Orlais."

"Only by rumor. It's said they're spies who masquerade as minstrels, seeking information that one noble house can use against another. There's even talk that some contract as assassins." Rìona's eyes widened and she stared at Leliana. "You?"

Her new friend nodded her head. "There is very little that will induce a man—or even sometimes a woman—to let go his secrets, or let down his guard, like the charms of a lovely woman, yes? So you see, I perhaps know something of what you mean. I, too, have seen terrible things come of such gambits."

Rìona shook her head in amazement. "And suddenly your being a lay sister makes even less sense."

"The Chantry provides succor for all, but my reasons for being there are a tale for another time." The bard rose, extending a hand to help Rìona up. "Come. You need rest."

Rest she did, after a vigorous washing with hot water from the buckets Bella brought to her room. While Rìona bathed and then conscientiously cleaned and oiled her leather armor, the barmaid chatted about her plans for running the inn now that Lloyd was dead. Bella didn't seem terribly grieved at her former employer's death, and Rìona couldn't find it within herself to be either.

"If there's no attack tonight, you tell the boys in the militia that the ale's on the house, to celebrate our victory," she concluded, gathering up Rìona's sweat-stained linen shirt and undergarments and vowing to have them laundered. "I'll have supper laid out for you well before sunset. Get some rest, love."

Sinking nude onto the straw tick of the rough bed in the small inn room, Rìona fell asleep almost immediately and didn't wake until mid-afternoon. She ate a light repast in the common room, and then set off in search of the town's leather-worker. Remembering her encounter with the villagers in Lothering, she intended to see what she could do about bartering her armor for something less recognizable. Leliana accompanied her to see about having a buckle on her own scavenged cuirass repaired.

He was an elderly man, one of those who had taken shelter in the Chantry, rather than any of the townsmen she recognized from the militia. She found him in the tannery, scraping hides.

"Good day, ser," Rìona called, drawing his attention. He squinted at her from his workbench and Rìona realized his eyesight was poor. She wondered if he even made armor anymore, or simply repaired what the villagers already possessed as best he could. "I find myself in need of a new set of leathers and wondered if you might have any to barter."

"Eh?" he squinted harder at her. "That what you're wearing looks sound enough."

"It is, indeed, ser. Somewhat in need of a more thorough cleaning and oiling than I've been able to give it in my travels, but in perfectly good condition otherwise. Alas, Teyrn Loghain has placed a price on the heads of all Grey Wardens and this is far too recognizable. It is also, I'm afraid, really too heavy for the daily use of one whose strongest skill is the bow; I'm afraid it was designed more with ceremonial wear in mind than actual battle."

As she drew near into the shade of the shed under which he was working, he was finally able to see her clearly. He took one look at her armor and made a sound of surprise.

"Maker's breath! Look at that craftsmanship. Never thought I would see two such sets."

"Two?" Rìona queried, her eyebrows lifting. "This set was custom-made by a crafter in Highever, Master Tobias. It was made specifically for me at my father's request, for my seventeenth Name Day. How have you come to see such a set?"

"Highever, yes!" He nodded eagerly. "It must be the same crafter, then. The sets aren't identical, mind you, but the workmanship is unmistakable. Come see!"

Bemused, Rìona followed him into his workshop and he brought forth an armor stand.

"D'you see now?" he asked, gesturing.

She did. The leather was dyed Highever green, but the elegant craftsmanship was, indeed, unmistakable. It was a lighter set than her own, the leather made more pliable by fewer layers, and larger panels of the same fine-wrought chain mesh her own armor bore. The gilded embossing on the pauldrons bore the crossed spears of Highever rather than the laurel-wreath Cousland device, but it unmistakably Master Tobias's work.

Rìona knew this set, knew who it had belonged to. Norah Mac Tiernan, captain of the city guard of Highever. Bryce Cousland had commissioned the set when appointing Norah to the post, for she had been a knight sworn to the Cousland banner and the first to be knighted by his own hand after he became teyrn.

"How did you come by this?" Rìona whispered.

"Trader came by a few weeks ago, after rumor of some nasty business in Highever reached us," the old man shrugged. "Said he purchased it from a soldier who had been sent in to the quell some riots that had killed the ruling family there. I think it may have been ill-gotten, though," he added, lowering his voice confidentially. "Said he got it for far too cheap, and he had a time of it removing the bloodstains."

"Ill-gotten indeed," Rìona said tightly. "Stolen from the corpse of a woman who fought valiantly to defend her home."

The armor was lighter than Rìona's own, for Norah's skills had been with the bow and her style had placed a premium on maneuverability for the archer in battle. Indeed, while she still served at Castle Cousland it was she who had trained Rìona. Seeing it, Rìona felt a yearning for home so strong she ached with it.

She touched the leather gingerly for a moment, running light fingertips across accents and intricate designs in gold and silver. "Unfortunately, I cannot use it," she said at last. "It may not match the description Loghain's men are passing around of me, but I'd be recognized by it in short order."

"Perhaps you are not meant to hide your identity," Leliana offered gently. "Perhaps the Maker has led you here to this armor which, after all, suits your needs so well. Perhaps you are meant to proclaim who you are proudly, for _you_ are a Grey Warden, and you shall save us all from the Blight. If you are to gather an army, you must be more than an anonymous shadow flitting past, yes? You must look the part of a general."

Rìona smiled wryly. "I shan't get very far gathering an army if I'm captured by those bent on claiming a bounty."

"You are by no means defenseless, for you have a company of strong fighters at your back and more flocking to your call soon," the bard argued. "If you hide, or act ashamed, does that not give more credibility to this Loghain's lies? You must stand in the light and let the truth be known."

When Rìona returned to the inn, it was in the green-dyed leathers, glancing down now and again at the Highever crest on her shoulder. The old leather-crafter had taken her heavier blue armor as an even trade, and Rìona had kissed his cheek for his kindness.

She joined her companions for supper in the common room and then led the way back up the path ascending the cliff-face to the windmill that overlooked the village, where Ser Perth waited to see if another attack would be coming.

The sun sank, but there was no sign of activity coming from the castle across the bridge, nor from the shores of the lake where some of the creatures had attacked from last night. They waited until long after full dark had descended and still there were no indications of an attack. Bann Teagan was summoned from the chantry to confer with Rìona and Ser Perth, at which point the decision was made to stand-down the militia, but post the knights around the village to keep watch and sound the alert in case the situation should change.

There was an air of weary jubilation as the townsmen put down their swords and bows. A great many rushed to the chantry to retrieve their wives and children. To the rest, Rìona called out, triumphant, "I have a message from Bella that ale shall be free tonight for any member of the militia who wishes to come to the tavern to celebrate! I believe I owe some of you fine gentlemen a dance?"

There was a good-natured cheer and Rìona, Alistair and the rest of their company made their way along the trail ascending the bluff where the tavern sat. She went up to her room to divest herself of her leather armor and came down in her simple linen undershirt and patched breeches.

Though the night had been frigid, within the tavern the heat soon became intense. Leliana had her lute, and several other of the villagers had instruments of some form or another, whether actually crafted or simply makeshift. More of the militia, those without children, began to pour in with their wives and sweethearts until there was hardly any room to sit. Ale and mead flowed freely, but Rìona sampled it cautiously, then sought out the lad Tomas to indulge in an energetic reel.

She found herself passed from one pair of arms to another as each of the militiamen to whom she'd promised dances claimed their turn to whirl her about the room with far more enthusiasm than grace. Her head spun dizzily and her cheeks were flushed with exertion and the heat, but it didn't matter. She was intoxicated. Not on ale, but on victory, on the adoration of these men and the sense of power she felt, on the fact that she was young and free for the first time in her life. Since she'd been fifteen, she'd held herself in check, foregoing the normal indulgences allowed a young woman her age in favor of a specific goal. The pleasures of courtship and flirtation she had denied herself for the sake of her ambition.

She laughed breathlessly as yet another man clad in rough homespun swung her around the crowded spaces of the inn's common room. Shouts and laughter buffeted her, and all around other townsfolk were dancing as well. She saw Mayor Murdock swinging about a lovely middle-aged woman who she imagined must be his wife. Then someone lost their balance and tumbled into Rìona and her partner. She fell forward, catching herself upon a table. She looked up and met a pair of intent golden eyes, bright with ale and filled with yearning.

Quickly, she pushed herself away from the table as he began to rise, turning to face her partner, before she utterly lost her senses and asked Alistair to dance.

"Come!" she gasped to the nameless man who had been twirling her about, grabbing his hand and dragging him through the throng. "I need a rest!"

Somehow she managed to make her way to the crowded bench where young Tomas sat, and wedged herself in beside him. She looked around, grateful to realize she was now at the far end of the tavern from Alistair, hidden from him by the dancing townsfolk, and could no longer feel his gaze. The blushing Tomas had obviously had his share of ale and then some. She leaned against Tomas' shoulder and deliberately let her hand fall on his thigh under the table.

It was exquisite, the way he tensed at her touch, his spine straightening, his every muscle quivering. The flush that crept its way up his neck had naught to do with the ale.

"Oo! Looks like she likes you, lad!" One of the other men at the table hooted, laughing. She thought it may have been the one who had ribbed young Tomas for being a virgin the previous day. His eyes, too, were bright with too much drink and the sheer joy at being alive.

Tomas blushed even more brightly and ducked his head, but did nothing to move away from her touch. Her fingers played along his thigh, caressing, rubbing, slipping up higher, curving toward his inner thigh. She could feel him against the back of her hand, hard and eager and straining against the rough fabric of his clothing. He shuddered with each "accidental" brush, and Rìona felt another surge of power. He was hers. They were all hers. Even the ones she would never touch, who would never touch her, were hers. When they went to bed that night with their wives, sweethearts, lovers or merely with some companion chosen nearly at random in the excitement of the celebration, it would be because she had given them the chance to live. She had given them that gift. Somehow, impossible as it seemed, she had brought them through a battle they had all thought would be unwinnable and they were hers.

Exhilaration coursed through her veins, sweeter than any spirits, setting her nerve endings a-tingle, making her heart race, making her body tighten with desire. For an instant her thoughts turned to Alistair. She imagined going to him, taking him by the hand and leading him up to her room. She imagined the pleasant taste of ale upon his breath as she kissed him, but then she slammed the door on that image within her mind. It could never be.

"It's too crowded in here," she said breathlessly near Tomas' ear, pitching her voice low to be heard over the din. "Let's go outside for some air."

The lad did not protest as she rose from the bench and tugged him by his hand to the door. The chill of the air outside was shocking after the stifling heat and press of bodies within the tavern, but it felt marvelous.

And then she had grabbed Tomas by his shirtfront and pinned against the wall of the tavern, kissing him hungrily. The lad was far too tipsy to be nervous; he grasped her eagerly, pulled her to his body, pressed closer when she arched and rubbed against him. That he was inexperienced was quickly confirmed, but it was not at all unpleasant to take her time and allow him to learn. Soon his lips were grasping at hers, his tongue thrusting to meet hers. He groaned low in his throat when her stance opened to allow his thigh to slip between hers, letting them press even closer to one another.

Already he was unconsciously thrusting against her, giving slight pushes of his hips as he sought more pressure, more friction. But though those first few breaths of fresh air had been bracing, it was far too cold for anything more. Rìona pulled away from his lips and gasped out, "The stables?"

Tomas swallowed hard and nodded emphatically, and then it was he taking her hand and leading her to the stables down the path from the inn. Within, they were sheltered from the cold, buffeting wind that blew in off Lake Calenhad. There was an unoccupied stall in the back with clean, sweet-smelling straw. She kissed young Tomas again, pulling at the laces of his breeches even as his hands made their way under her shirt, only to be stymied by the breast bindings she hadn't removed. Rìona drew away from his clutching hands, drawing her shirt up over her head and releasing the strip of linen that kept her breasts from chafing under her armor. She kicked off her boots and untied the drawstring on her own breeches, shucking them. Then she pushed the lad's breeches off his hips and guided him down onto the straw, straddling him.

It was dark in the stable, only the faintest hint of moonlight filtering in, a fact for which she was grateful. In that dim light, his copper hair was far too dark to allow her to confuse him with the other virgin upon whom she fixated far too readily. Tomas' hands were shaking with need when he cupped her breasts, and Rìona knew he would not last long. And so she took one of his hands and guided it between her thighs, using his fingertips to find the pulsing nub there.

"Here," she gasped, bucking at the pressure. She spared a moment to think of the wife the lad would someday take and hoped that unknown woman would thank her for this small but crucial lesson. "This is where you pleasure a woman, with fingers and lips and tongue. Let her guide you if she's bold, and encourage her to do so if she's retiring. Whatever else you may someday learn about pleasure, always remember that."

He was awkward at first, but at her guidance found the right pressure and rhythm, and soon Rìona was rocking against his fingers, her body tightening, quivering, hovering there on the edge and then gratefully toppling over. She kissed him again as her short-lived, shallow shudders subsided, resting a moment, and then she rose back up and guided him into her.

Scarcely had she begun to adjust to the feel of him within her and started to move than he was spent, grunting and grasping her hips, thrusting up into her. His head was thrown back, his neck extended, his mouth open and jaw tense with the rigor of pleasure. Rìona could not begrudge him the brevity, though it left her body achingly discontented and ready for more. When he could speak again, he stammered a thank you, and Rìona smiled.

"Bann Teagan or Arl Eamon will be calling for an army soon, won't they?" he asked after a moment, unwontedly sober. "To fight the darkspawn in the south?"

"Yes," Rìona answered honestly. "It's why I'm here."

"Those creatures were awful enough. If that's what battle is like, I don't even want to imagine fighting the darkspawn. I'll go if they call, I guess. I just... at least I've had this, tonight."

"Go home and _live_, Tomas," she said, kissing his forehead as though in benediction. She rose and handed him his clothing. "For as many days as you have. Do not spend your life in fear and dread of what may come. Instead, take what joys and pleasures the Maker's world offers you and be grateful for each of them."

"I shall. Thank you, my lady Warden. I will never forget this."

She felt melancholy as he dressed and departed, sitting there in the straw hugging her knees to her chest. She waited until he had gone before finding a bucket of stale water and a cloth to wash with that didn't smell as though it had been used to wipe down the horses, then dressed and made her way back to the inn.

The sounds of celebration from within seemed to be less, now, but still raucous and joyful enough that it did not suit her, suddenly somber, mood to enter and rejoin the merriment. There was a trio of townsmen gathered outside the tavern, laughing together and sampling the contents of a jug of something Rìona suspected to be much stronger than ale.

"Warden!" One of them called, and she recognized the voice as being one of the men with whom she had danced. Horace, she thought; a ruggedly handsome, gregarious fellow who had seemed to spend a great deal of time staring at the barmaid, Bella. "Care for a drink? I distilled this myself."

Forcing a charming smile to her face, she accepted the proffered jug and tipped it. Mindful of the fact that she would need to be clear-headed on the morrow, she took only the small drink, but it was more than enough. She gasped and coughed as the fiery brew within burned its way down her throat to her stomach.

"Andraste's tits!" she spluttered, when she could speak again; her throat felt as though it had been seared. Already the warmth of the spirits was spreading through her veins, making the cold of the night air seem insignificant. A chorus of raucous laughter answered her, but though they pressed her to take another drink, she declined with a laughing shake of her head.

_Take what joys and pleasures the Maker's world offers you._

How long she stood there with them, Rìona wasn't certain. No longer troubled by the cold with even just that small sample of whiskey burning in her belly, she was content to remain outside, flirting and laughing with them of simple, inconsequential things.

"Bella, m'love!" one of the drunken men called. "Come. Have a drink with us!"

Rìona turned to see the barmaid—now the proprietress, she supposed—emerging from the tavern, her cheeks flushed and her face shining with cooling sweat from the heat indoors and the chore of waiting upon the celebrating villagers.

Smiling, Bella accepted the jug and drank, closing her eyes and shuddering as she sampled the whiskey and let it warm her. "You always did brew the strongest spirits in Redcliffe, Horace," she said fondly after a moment. "Now that I'm running the tavern and Lloyd's not around to water them down, you and I should talk business sometime."

"Who's minding the tavern now?" Rìona asked.

"No one!" the new owner of the Redcliffe tavern announced proudly. "Men are starting to drift out and head home anyway, so I told the militia to help themselves to the taps for the night. It'll be a chore to clean up tomorrow, but the boys have earned it."

"You'll make back twice what you lose in goodwill alone," Rìona observed. "It's well done."

Bella preened at the praise. "Well, I never imagined actually having my own tavern, but I think I'll do all right. The people of Redcliffe are decent folk, for the most part, and I think they'll appreciate having a more welcoming tavern to relax in than Lloyd ever offered them."

Eventually, one of the men with whom they chatted—Bella knew them well and was friendly with them, trading flirtations and insults alike with casual ease—departed for his home. Soon thereafter, the other went as well, leaving Rìona alone with Bella and Horace, who had brought the whiskey. She wasn't entirely certain how she ended up back in the stables with the two of them, but there were hands and lips, warm, lean flesh and softly rounded curves and it was good. Good to be caressed with rough, knowing hands by one and delicate, exploratory fingertips by the other. Good to feel the bristle of an unshaven chin against the tender skin of her breast and the soft press of a woman's lips against her own. Good to taste the bite of the whiskey on their tongues.

As the dance had been intoxicating, so was this, too. She cried out her pleasure as Bella lightly scraped her sensitive nipple with her teeth and Horace pushed her thighs apart, bringing Rìona to a shuddering climax with thrusts and flicks of his tongue.

Pleasure, unrestrained and freely given. Joy and life and victory. It was a heady combination, and she was drunk on it. Drunk as she caressed Bella while the barmaid pleasured Horace. Drunk with soft, slick heat as she explored Bella's folds, making her cry out in rapture. Drunk at the scent of musk mingled with sweet hay. Drunk as she lay under Bella and ground against her while Horace thrust into Bella from behind. Drunk as she licked Bella's essence off Horace's shaft. Drunk as she lay on her back in the straw, her legs around Horace's waist, moaning another climax into Bella's soft mouth. Drunk on their groans and whimpers of pleasure, on their delightful responsiveness to her touch, on the fact that she had only to murmur her desire and they hastened to obey and bring her pleasure.

Drunk. Surely she must be, to not have heard the voices sooner, male and female. One rich and mellow, the other sweet and flavored with a lilting accent.

"You're sure she didn't come back inside the tavern, or go to her room?"

"No, I was watching for her. She hasn't been feeling well; I'm worried she might be sick somewhere—_Maker's breath!_"

Leliana's soft gasp followed Alistair's exclamation and the spell of rapture was broken, Rìona's eyes opening to meet their shocked gazes in the semi-darkness of the stables. For a moment Horace was lost in his own pleasure, though Bella withdrew slightly at the astonishment of being discovered. Quickly and blessedly silent, Leliana grabbed Alistair's arm and dragged him from the stables before he could say or do anything.

There was a moment of deafening quiet as Horace realized she had gone still and unresponsive. He stopped moving to look down at her in consternation while Bella asked softly, "Would you like us to go, Warden?"

To cringe in shame, to act caught-out and embarrassed, would only send the message that they had done something wrong. For as long as she could remember, she'd been told there was nothing shameful or sinful about the pleasures of the flesh. Her body had been made to give and receive such joys, and to refuse or deny it was to disdain the Maker's gift. These villagers, who had survived such impossible odds, deserved more than to be left feeling they had done something wrong, and to have their celebration at their own triumph marred by shame.

_She_ deserved more.

"No," she said firmly, pulling Horace—still lodged within her—down into a deep kiss. She hooked her ankles around his thighs and whimpered in delight when he began to move again. He pushed himself up on his arms to gain more leverage and she reached for Bella, drawing the barmaid down to her breast.

She closed her eyes and focused on her pleasure, letting it drive out self-consciousness.

_I will not be ashamed!_

_**Note:** I will be on vacation from Dec 19 to Jan 6. I will not be posting bi-weekly chapters during that time. On Friday, Dec 17 I will post two chapters, and then another two chapters when I get back, on Friday, Jan 7. Happy holidays!_


	13. Chapter Thirteen: Revelations, Part Two

The tavern was quiet when Rìona entered again. Only a few lanterns, and the blaze on the hearth, lit the common room. Bella was sweeping up the old rushes that were saturated with spilled ale and gathering up discarded tankards, while Leliana sat alone in a corner, playing her lute softly. She set it aside as Rìona approached and studied her with grave eyes.

"Alistair is down by the lake," the bard said without preamble. "You should go talk to him."

"Down by the lake, in this cold? He's mad!"

"No, just shocked and distraught."

"And what of you?" Rìona asked, lifting her chin.

Leliana shrugged. "One does not entertain Orlesian nobility for years without seeing a great many things. It inures one to the shock, yes? I cannot begin to know what your burden must be, as a Grey Warden facing the Blight. How, then, can I judge?"

"That's not the opinion I expected to hear from one dedicated to the Chantry."

"I was merely affirmed, not dedicated," Leliana corrected easily. "And there is nothing in the Chant of Light that forbids pleasure of any kind between willing partners."

"That doesn't stop the Chantry from condemning it, nonetheless," Rìona observed.

Leliana tipped her head in acknowledgment of the point. "That is true, I suppose. But it is not the first time my own understanding of the Maker, and His will, has conflicted with the teachings of the Chantry and I suppose it will not be the last."

"And what is your own opinion?"

"That the Maker would not have made us to feel pleasure in so many varied ways, if He did not intend us to seek it out in all its variety." The bard looked away, her face grown sad and distant. "It is when those same gifts are used to hurt another that it becomes a sin. But come. Alistair is still standing in the cold. You must speak with him. He was too young when he went to the monastery and was there too long; he does not understand as I do."

"If he's fool enough to stand in the cold, he can wait for me to bathe first," Rìona announced firmly, and went up the stairs to her room.

Despite her words, she hastened to wash with the buckets of water left beside the fire in her room, ridding herself of the traces of the men she had lain with, the odor of sweat and musk and the dust of hay. It felt as though the night had been very long, but it was just past midnight, judging by the position of the moon. This far south and this close to First Day, nightfall came very early.

She found him shivering on the shores of Lake Calenhad, clutching his threadbare cloak around him. Tithes must have been scarce indeed, if Duncan had not outfitted Alistair better than this, she thought, remembering the state of the armor he'd been wearing when she first met him. Once they dealt with the situation up in the castle, she would have to speak with Bann Teagan, or perhaps even Arl Eamon, about provisioning her companions, or they would not survive the winter.

He did not look at her as she approached, but his shoulders stiffened and she knew he heard her footsteps crunching against the stones of the rocky shore. The wind off the lake was bitingly cold and she had no cloak to protect her from its chill. Had he been another man, she might have found a way to press close to him and share his warmth, but that was not going to happen with Alistair. The best she could hope for was to stand behind him and let his bulk shelter her from the worst of it.

"I almost left tonight, you know," he said at last, not turning to face her. He kicked a pebble into the lake. "I almost walked away and left all this behind. If it hadn't been for my duty as a Grey Warden, I would have done it."

She stood silent, and after a moment he spun about to look at her. "How could you—? Why would you—? I don't even know what to call what I saw in that stable tonight! 'Perversion' seems like a good word to start with!"

"Really? Perversion. According to whom?"

He blinked in surprise, as though unable to believe she actually needed to ask. "Well, the Chantry, for a start."

"Oh, indeed?" Rìona huffed a short, humorless laugh. "Hmm. That's rich, coming from you."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Tell me, what's more perverse?" she asked sharply. "Celebrating one's own survival of a near-hopeless battle by taking pleasure in a way that harms no one, or forcing healthy young men and women to abjure all hope of pleasure and companionship for all their days, enslaving them by means of lyrium addiction until they go mad, all so they can hunt down people whose only sin has been to be born with the ability to do magic?"

"_What?_ That makes no sense! One has nothing to do with the other!"

"Don't be obtuse. Of course it has!" Rìona snapped impatiently. "The Chantry is wrong in the way it treats its templars; you've said it yourself, _experienced_ it yourself. If the Chantry is fallible on that point, then why can it not be fallible on others?"

"That's blasphemy."

"It is not. I've said _nothing_ that contradicts the Chant of Light. It is the Chantry that blasphemes, taking the supposed will of the Maker and warping it to justify the pursuit of earthly power, in the process painting the gifts the Maker has given us in sin and shame."

"Oh, Maker's breath!" Alistair growled in frustration, pacing away from her in agitation. "I'm not going to debate theology with you! Maybe you're right. Maybe the Chantry has got it wrong. But that doesn't make what you did tonight any less of a disgrace. If nothing else, it reflects badly on the Grey Wardens. With Loghain trying to smear us—you said yourself we have to be careful. Duncan would never have—"

Rìona cut off his tirade with a bitter laugh. "Duncan recruited me knowing full well what I was. I was to be his 'goodwill ambassador.'"

"I don't understand. What does that mean?"

"It _means_ he recruited me to use my charms and favors to coax out of the nobility the tithes and recruits he could not persuade them to otherwise give."

Alistair stared at her in shocked disbelief. "But... that would make you a harlot."

"Perhaps," Rìona shrugged. "I don't sell myself for money, but I do use sex to achieve my ends when I feel it necessary, and I'm not ashamed to take my pleasures where I can get them. If that makes me a harlot, so be it. But it's not for my skills with a bow that Duncan recruited me."

"No, you're lying." He shook his head in adamant denial. "Duncan would never have done such a thing. He wasn't a—"

"'Whore-master?' Because that's precisely what he called himself, after he recruited me. He knew quite well what he was about, and if he flinched from it, it was only a very little."

"No."

"_Yes,_" Rìona insisted. "You were there at my Joining. You saw what Duncan did to Ser Jory. He did that simply to preserve the Grey Wardens' secrets. Do you honestly believe he'd stint at playing the panderer if it meant getting us the resources and cooperation we needed to end the Blight? Duncan was—" Rìona broke off, feeling absurdly near tears as she thought of that final day at Ostagar, and her sense of betrayal when she learned just how far Duncan would go. Swallowing hard, she forced her voice to remain steady. "Duncan was a man of deep and powerful passions, but he was also a devout pragmatist. He cared about results, not some arbitrary set of abstract concepts known as morality. He used me to ease matters on the diplomatic front, among other things."

"Are you saying he—?"

"Fucked me? Oh, Maker, yes," Rìona purred, taking a cruel satisfaction in shocking him, for his condemnation injured her more than she cared to admit. "And my mother as well, while my father looked on. He was a great _friend_ of the Couslands, you see."

"_Maker's blood_, why am I listening to this?" Alistair pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes, turning a restless circle. Almost against his will, he asked reluctantly, "Your _parents_? Honestly?"

Rìona sighed, no longer feeling a desire to torment him. "You must understand about my family, Alistair. My father met my mother in Antiva, where she worked in an elite brothel. She'd been trained as a courtesan and among the many other skills such training imparts is a rather delicate, seductive sort of diplomacy. My father feared that the prominence of the Couslands would wane after the Orlesian war. The newly-elevated Teyrn Loghain held the king's ear firmly and seemed determined not to leave the bitterness of the past behind. My father knew it would be disastrous, not to turn Ferelden away from the past, and form alliances with our neighbors. He knew it would lead us to precisely the point at which we now find ourselves. The insularity upon which Loghain insisted has crippled us and left us without allies when we most needed them. And so my father and mother formed a great partnership. She used her skills at seduction to win him allies in the Landsmeet and ensure that his voice remained a powerful influence to counterbalance Loghain's counsel. And they trained their children in those same skills.

"I began my tutelage in the sensual arts shortly before my thirteenth year, when my courses began. That's when girls begin their tuition as courtesans in Antiva. In theory only, of course; no one touched me at that age. At first I simply read erotic texts, most of which were proscribed by the Chantry. I learned about my body. I was encouraged to explore and discover how to bring myself pleasure. I was never asked to do anything I did not wish to do, and it was made absolutely clear to me that I did not have to learn if I did not wish it. As time passed, I acquired more practical skills. I practiced fellatio with bananas and warmed cucumbers. I learned cunnilingus on peaches with a small slit cut in them, so that I had to delve inside to reach the pith with my tongue, the sticky juice running down my chin. It wasn't until I was fifteen that I was permitted to use these skills on another person, learning to pleasure a partner, and I remained a maiden up until the day I arrived at Ostagar. The purpose of all this, of course, was that I would someday also use my skills to form alliances and win concessions where diplomacy alone failed."

"What I saw in the stables tonight wasn't about diplomacy," Alistair pointed out.

"No," she agreed. "It was merely pleasure. A celebration of our survival. But it's all part of who I am. All part of what my upbringing has made me, what _Duncan_ made me, even."

"Why are you telling me this?" Alistair asked, no longer irate. His voice was still tense with disapproval, though, his jaw clenched. He refused to meet her eyes.

"Because I won't change, Alistair," she answered, her voice softly determined. "I won't change, and I won't be shamed. Not by you, not by anyone. This is what I am, it's what I do. And, Maker preserve us, if I must use sex to disarm our enemies or win us the allies we need to get through this Blight—as Duncan intended me to do—then I will do it. Moreover, I would fuck Maferath himself next to Andraste's own pyre if it will give me the means to bring Teyrn Loghain and Arl Howe to account for their crimes. It was _your_ will that I should be our leader. Therefore, you can either accept it, and accept _me_, or you can remain silent. Because I will not be lectured to about the morality of the Chantry, least of all by _you_, who should know better."

He didn't respond, staring morosely out over the lake, and after a moment he turned on his heel and began to walk away in the direction of the tavern. She called out after him.

"You may as well also be aware that I'm with child," she said. He froze and turned slowly, gawking at her. "It's why I've been ill and tired."

"But... you're a Grey Warden."

"So?"

"As far as I'm aware, it's rare, maybe even unheard of, for Grey Wardens to have children," Alistair explained, and then it was Rìona's turn to stare.

"Oh, _Maker's balls!_" she breathed, and Alistair squirmed uncomfortably at the epithet. "Duncan knew this?"

Alistair nodded and Rìona shook her head in astonishment. "And still he permitted me to—oh, never-mind," she muttered in disgust, waving a hand dismissively. "It's most likely the babe was conceived before my Joining."

Alistair gave a terse nod and turned to walk away again. Rìona supposed she should have followed him; they would have a long day ahead of them, depending on what their investigation of the castle turned up. But she felt restless and anxious following Alistair's revelation. Duncan would have allowed her to marry the king, knowing it unlikely, if not impossible, for her to bear Cailan an heir. In time, she would have been disgraced and cast aside, brought down by another as she herself had plotted to bring down Queen Anora.

Just when Rìona felt she was beginning to understand the desperation which had driven Duncan, a new layer of betrayal made it all the harder to forgive him and make peace with all she had done on his behalf.

Her heart was heavy and she was shivering with the cold as she made her way up into the dark, quiet village from the shores of the lake. Here and there, a shadow moved with a rattle of plate armor; the knights still kept watch for any activity from the castle. Unwilling to return to the inn just yet, Rìona found herself at the steps of the village chantry, of all places. Sighing, she opened the door and entered the darkened sanctuary.

All was silent within. All the townsfolk had returned to their homes, and Mother Hannah had retired to her small rectory cottage behind the chantry proper. Rìona walked to the front of the chantry and sank down upon a pew, pulling her feet up to rest her chin on her knees. She felt desperately alone. She yearned for her mother and father, for their comforting arms, for their loving encouragement, telling her she had done well and that there was no shame in using her body for the purpose the Maker had given it. She even yearned for Cailan, fool though he was, that she might tell him about the child within her and see his exuberant glee at the news.

"Lady Cousland? I mean, Rìona?" a soft, rich voice inquired, and the shadows leading to the back rooms of the chantry resolved themselves into a human shape.

"Bann Teagan? I'm sorry, I didn't know anyone was here. I hope I didn't disturb you."

"No, not at all. I was just... wandering. After so many nights of fear and uncertainty, I am finding it hard to sleep."

"That seems to be a common theme, tonight."

He looked at her curiously. "After all you've been through and all you've done, a good night's rest would not come amiss."

"After all I've done?" Rìona laughed softly, bitterly. "After all I've done, I should be lucky to ever bring myself to sleep again."

"Surely one so lovely and gracious cannot have all that many sins to repent," the bann said, his voice gently chiding.

"You've no idea what I've done."

"I have no need to know," he shrugged, sitting beside her on the pew. "I am no revered mother to hear your confession and repentance. I have seen your actions here. You risked your life and the lives of your companions to save innocents, when perhaps your goal might have been better met had you continued on your way and not taken the trouble. You have given lie to all Loghain's claims about the perfidy of the Grey Wardens."

"Even if I told you that it was my actions on behalf of the Grey Wardens that led to the death of the king?"

"What?" he asked, recoiling in shock. "Tell me that's not true!"

"Not the way Teyrn Loghain tells it, no. There was no trap, no betrayal—at least not on the part of the Grey Wardens," Rìona insisted. "We did everything we could to save the king, to convince Cailan to fall back and seek reinforcements before confronting the darkspawn horde. But they moved too fast; we were forced to engage them at Ostagar or be caught out in the open."

"Then what is all this talk of you causing the death of the king?"

Rìona told him, sparing no detail. She told him of her years of scheming to marry the king, told him of seducing Cailan at Duncan's behest. She told him how she manipulated the king's vanity and desire for glory to obtain his agreement with Duncan's plan to call for reinforcements.

"And it was that which drove Loghain to treason," she concluded. "So incensed was he that we convinced Cailan to call upon the Orlesians for aid that he turned traitor and quit the field, abandoning his king to die. Had it not been for my interference, he would have brought his troops into the battle and flanked the darkspawn horde, turning the tide, perhaps even decisively."

Teagan rose from the pew, pacing away from her. "I scarcely know what to make of this. Since when do Grey Wardens involve themselves with seductions and political intrigues?"

She bowed her head. "Since it became apparent that no one, least of all King Cailan, understood the enormity of the threat posed by the Blight. You said you didn't believe the king would risk everything in the name of glory, but that was precisely what he was poised to do, until we convinced him otherwise. Until _I_ convinced him otherwise and, Maker help me, made everything worse in the process."

"No, I do not believe that," he said, looking at her over his shoulder as he stood facing the statue of Andraste at the front of the sanctuary. "What did Cailan have before your gambit that he did not have afterward? His forces were hopelessly outnumbered either way, were they not?"

"Outnumbered, yes, but perhaps not hopelessly, not if Loghain's strategy had been played out. And it is there, in his desertion, that my sin lies, for it was I who drove him to madness and betrayal."

"I think you take too much upon yourself," the bann said, turning to her. "You could not know that Loghain, who was once King Maric's closest friend and staunchest ally, would turn to treason and allow Maric's son to die."

"Could I not?" Rìona asked miserably. "My father knew Loghain was dangerously paranoid for years. Isn't it possible the warning signs were there, but I missed them because I was too caught up in my own vanity and ambition?"

"If you're seeking absolution from me, my lady, I cannot grant it. Even if it were in my power, I do not see the sin that weighs so heavily upon you," Teagan said kindly, squatting before her where she sat upon the pew and taking her hands. "I cannot begin to know the desperation that drove Warden-Commander Duncan to set you upon such a course, but I know beyond a doubt that these are desperate times, indeed. It was not vanity, or ambition, that led you to save our village and render us aid when we needed it most. You carry a burden I can never comprehend. I cannot judge or condemn your methods."

Rìona released his hands and stood, leaving him crouched before the pew as she paced restlessly toward one of the many bookshelves lining the chantry walls. There were none of the tomes she knew so well, of course, and once again she wondered why that was. What had provoked the chantry to ban erotic texts?

"Perhaps it would be easier if you were to chide me," she sighed at last. "Your reassurances, however kindly meant, provide no balm for my soul."

She did not hear him approach, and the fall of his hands upon her shoulders startled her. She allowed herself to be drawn back against his chest, listened to his deep inhalation as he pressed his nose into her hair, his hands stroking lightly up and down her arms.

"Would you perhaps settle for laying down your burden awhile?"

Strange, after all she'd done this night, weary and as she was, that being approached with gentleness should draw such a powerful yearning from her. She thought of all that had passed since that night in Cailan's tent at Ostagar and realized that through it all, tenderness and consideration had been severely lacking.

"No," she murmured. The hands fell away from her shoulders, and his warmth retreated as he stepped quickly back.

"Forgive me—"

"I will not allow you to be just another man whom I fuck, Teagan," Rìona said, turning to him with a soft smile. "But I should very much like it if you were to make love to me."

His kiss was gentle, sweet, clean. He demanded nothing but requested all, and she gave it. Slowly, they stripped one another of their clothes and made their way back to the pew where she'd sat.

Perhaps it was blasphemy, then, that Teagan knelt between her knees and bent over, bringing her to a soft, shuddering climax with lips and tongue, but it did not feel wrong. Nor did it feel wrong when he straightened, moving closer to her, his own need hard and insistent as he pressed into her. Her legs locked around his waist, her ankles crossed above his backside. His hands weighed her breasts, his thumbs stroking skillfully over her nipples as he moved within her. His lips were reverent as he kissed her shoulders, her neck, her mouth as she gasped her pleasure.

No, it did not feel like blasphemy. When her next climax broke over her, it came like a blessing, a benediction, the light of Andraste's own grace shining down upon her. Rìona subsided within his arms as his movements became more urgent, more needful, and as he seized and shuddered, she embraced him and knew peace.


	14. Chapter Fourteen: Discord

Castle Redcliffe sat atop a high bluff on a rocky island a short distance off the shore of Lake Calenhad. A long bridge connected it to the mainland, and a steep road descended the cliff-face into the village. It was at the bottom of that road that Bann Teagan Guerrin and his knights gathered, prepared to approach the castle with Rìona and her company and gain entrance.

Or that had been the plan, until a lone figure came running down the rocky road toward them.

Arlessa Isolde Guerrin was beautiful and young. Though Rìona had willingly kept away from court in order to preserve her mystique for the day she began her seduction of the king, she had made it her business to know everything she could about the Fereldan nobility with whom she would one day be interacting. What she hadn't learned from her parents, she'd gathered from Alistair.

Before he stopped talking to her entirely, that was.

Lady Isolde was unreasonably pious, according to Rìona's mother. She'd been very young when Arl Eamon had married her; a mere fifteen years old. Seeing the woman for the first time, Rìona felt she finally understood what had happened. The aging arl had clearly been enraptured with the young girl's beauty, enough so that he proved willing to annoy his brother-in-law, King Maric, by wedding an Orlesian. Rìona was willing to guarantee that Eamon's encountering Isolde had been no accident. No doubt her noble parents had established lucrative investments in Ferelden during the Orlesian occupation and did not wish for them to languish. So they had thrown their young daughter in Eamon's path, and convinced her of her duty to wed a man nearly thrice her age in order to keep the connection to their Fereldan interests active.

Such marriages were far from uncommon. In other circumstances, Rìona might have been inclined to pity the woman, wed so young to a man on the verge of old age and decline. After all, not all men were equal to her father, or Duncan, in their passion and vigor at such an age. But reports had it that Eamon doted on his pretty young wife and acquiesced to her every whim. Of course, some of that intelligence was from Alistair, who had his own reasons to be bitter toward the arlessa. He blamed her for his having been sent off to the monastery, claiming that she had been insecure over the rumors that Eamon was his father. While Rìona didn't doubt that might very well have been a part of the decision to send Alistair off to train as a templar, now that she knew the truth about Alistair's parentage, she was also certain that politics had played a larger role in the matter than Alistair, in his naïveté, suspected.

Rìona would have imagined the woman to be feeling the absence of passion keenly, married to so old a man, were it not for her purported piety. If Eamon failed to do his duty frequently in her bed—which could very well explain why it took them so long to have a child—it was possible the arlessa did not take it much amiss.

But then, it was also possible Lady Isolde found other indulgences for her passions, Rìona thought, with a cynical quirk of her eyebrow. Behind her she heard Morrigan make a softly derisive sound and Leliana was struggling to keep a straight face. According to Owen the blacksmith, whose daughter was one of the arlessa's maids, Isolde might have been having an affair with a tutor she had hired for her son, Connor. Judging from the scene before her, however, Rìona suspected the Orlesian woman had her sights set closer within the family. The arlessa was playing Bann Teagan as skillfully as ever Leliana had strummed her lute.

Perhaps it took being a woman familiar with the art of seduction to recognize what Isolde was doing, for Sten gave no indication of seeing anything amiss with Lady Isolde's blatant manipulation of her brother-in-law, and while Alistair eyeballed the woman with thinly-veiled resentment, he did not speak out against her pleas that Teagan accompany her back to the castle alone.

Teagan at least had the grace to look embarrassed, casting furtive glances out of the corner of his eye at Rìona. Truthfully, it had not occurred to her to be possessive or jealous. She had no claim on the bann nor did she want any such thing. Her particular brand of diplomacy, after all, was intended to win allies and generate goodwill, and therefore she knew to steer carefully clear of any man or woman whose affections—or honor—were engaged. Cailan had clearly been an exception to that ironclad rule, but Teagan was not. Had she any idea that there was a pre-existing entanglement, she would never have consented to his advances in the chantry the previous night.

But then, Teagan did not strike her as a dishonorable man. Certainly not the sort who would carry on with his brother's wife. What, then, was Isolde's hold upon him, that he was willing to even consider her supplications?

"This could be a trap," Rìona pointed out, and won the arlessa's antipathy for her efforts. But there was something wrong in her responses. If Lady Isolde's manipulation of Teagan was amorous, then it would have been merely vain rivalry that fueled her hostility toward Rìona. But there something furtive in the way the woman's eyes darted restlessly about. Rìona did not know the nature of the arlessa's claim upon Teagan, or her purpose in requesting he come back to the castle with her, but she knew beyond any question that Lady Isolde was lying.

The problem, Isolde attested, was that a mage had infiltrated her household and poisoned her husband. She swore she did not know how or why, but somehow the mage was responsible for the creatures which had attacked the village and killed most of the occupants of the castle, sparing only the arl, his wife and son, and a few of their knights.

"But that's not the extent of it, is it?" Rìona asked when Lady Isolde had finished spinning her tale. She remembered the blacksmith's account of his daughter's gossip. Arlessa Isolde had been acting strangely, keeping secrets from her husband. The blacksmith thought perhaps she had been practicing blood magic, though such an account seemed at odds with her purported piety. "There's more. Something you're not disclosing."

The arlessa favored her with a resentful glare, but would not meet Rìona's eyes. "That is a very impertinent accusation!" she protested. Her Orlesian accent was heavy and grating on the ears; nothing at all like Leliana's sweet lilt. "My husband lies dying and my son is at the mercy of that... thing! There is no time for these questions. If I don't return soon, there is no saying what this thing will do!"

It was a lie, or at least not the entire truth. That knowledge was reflected upon the faces of everyone present, even Teagan. But knowing it was a lie was not enough to stop Teagan acquiescing to the arlessa's demands. In the end, there was nothing Rìona could say that would sway him; he had no choice. He realized the danger as well as she did, but if he didn't go, and harm befell the arl or his family, Teagan would always be haunted by the idea that he might have prevented it if only he had cooperated.

Men prepare themselves for death in different ways, Rìona realized as he pulled her aside to speak with her privately. Duncan had done so by moving determinedly forward, refusing to succumb until his work was done even as the measures he took to see it completed became more extreme. Cailan had done so with a final desperate, explosive indulgence in passion.

In contrast, Teagan's acceptance of the possibility of his own death was quiet and gentle.

"If only matters were different..." he said remorsefully when she made a final effort to convince him not to go. He caressed her face with light fingertips, unconcerned by the presence of his knights or her companions who watched from a distance. Rìona saw the process as he collected himself, setting his shoulders resolutely, his jaw tightening with determination.

"It is not my intention to go in quite so alone as Isolde thinks," he said after a moment. "There's a tunnel in the mill that runs under the lake into the dungeons of the castle. My signet opens the way. Perhaps I can distract whatever is inside the castle so that you can move about unnoticed. You must remember, though. Eamon is your objective; you must save him if you can. The rest of us are expendable."

"Don't be an idiot!" Rìona chided. Somewhere within, the part of her tutored to assess and calculate political advantage knew that what he said was true. Arl Eamon was her ticket to overthrowing Loghain's bid for power and commanding the remainder of Ferelden's fighting forces. But she couldn't see herself allowing Teagan or other innocents to die merely to save him.

She found herself wondering what Duncan would have had to say about that. The thought only goaded her desire to save them all, if she possibly could.

"Another conquest?" Alistair asked snidely after the bann had walked away up the steep road toward the bridge. "He's the younger brother, you know. You're not likely to get much out of him."

Rìona stopped, stunned for an instant at the venom in his tone, her muscles rigid with surprise and outrage. She made herself resume walking, made her shoulders relax, made a smile tilt her lips. She would not let his narrow-minded indoctrination force her to reactive defensively or make her feel ashamed.

She shrugged, shaking off that irritated, bristling feeling, and lifted her chin. "Hardly a conquest. The only thing I want from _him_ is pleasure. Which he delivers _quite_ ably, I might add."

Then it was Alistair's turn to falter in his steps, gawking at her.

Rìona offered him a sweet smile, marred only by the cruel spark in her eyes. "Don't ask, if you don't want to know," she advised calmly, and turned her back on Alistair to walk into the mill.

* * *

It took hours to fight their way through more of the undead creatures which had attacked the village, clustered in groups throughout the castle from the dungeon to courtyard. So many dead, Rìona mourned silently, looking at the trail of corpses they left in their wake. With the exception of the blood mage in the dungeons, who had been hired by Teyrn Loghain to poison the arl, it wasn't until they found the blacksmith's daughter cowering in the servants' quarters that they encountered a living soul. The girl, Valena, was traumatized and terrified, and Rìona had to speak softly and soothingly to her even to make a dent in her hysteria. Behind her, she could hear Morrigan's contemptuous sigh, but the girl was a liability to them, frightened out of her wits. Finally, Rìona managed to calm her and send her back the way their party had come, through the dungeons and under the lake to the village, and they were able to fight their way to the portcullis in front of the castle where Ser Perth and his men awaited them.

In contrast to Morrigan's disdain, she could feel Alistair's surprised gaze upon her, and once the blacksmith's daughter had fled, she turned a challenging stare upon him.

"Is there something you need?" she asked with ill humor.

"It's just—you've been in a frothing fury since we encountered the maleficar in the dungeons, but you were so... _nice_ to her."

"Of course I'm furious!" Rìona snapped at him. "Dozens of people are dead because that _simpleton_ Isolde hired a mage in secret to tutor her son, rather than risk him being sent to the Circle Tower once it became known that he had magical ability. But none of that is the girl's fault. Why should I take my temper out on her?"

"I would have thought you would sympathize with Arlessa Isolde, with as many objections to the Chantry as you have," Alistair observed, and there was a hint of tension in his tone, as though he was daring her to contradict herself.

"I have objections to the policies of the Chantry, not to the Chant of Light itself. _Magic exists to serve man, and never to rule over him._" Rìona shook her head, stepping firmly on the deep thread of pain that threatened to weave its way to the surface of her mind. "But nothing in the Chant mentions breaking apart families and depriving mages of their freedom. I deplore the way mages are treated. Children are ripped away from their families and locked in a tower for life once their ability is known. Innocent men and women are hunted down like animals by the templars for the sole offense of wanting to be free. They're treated as criminals without ever having committed a crime. So yes, I understand _why_ Lady Isolde did what she did."

"And yet you blame her," he pointed out.

"I do." Rìona said firmly. "Rather than have her son trained to use magic properly, she instead had him trained to attempt to conceal it. It was a situation that was bound to end in disaster. And to further compound her error, rather than confess her mistake and seek to rectify the situation, she continued to bury it under lie after lie, even as the death toll mounted. Then she tried to blame it on that mage, Jowan. And you heard what he said. It was not _merely_ a desire not to be parted from her only child that motivated her. In her supposed piety, she is ashamed of having a mage for a son. People have died to spare her _embarrassment_."

Rìona snarled and kicked one of the partially decomposed corpses they had dispatched. She hadn't gotten nearly enough sleep and the full folly of that was making itself well-known to her, by means of a wicked headache and a rotten temper. This was the closest she and Alistair had come to making civil conversation since their confrontation on the shores of the lake the night before. That was, if a quasi-antagonistic conversation in which she clearly got the impression that the former templar was mentally bouncing on the balls of his feet, eagerly awaiting an opportunity to pounce and shout, _"Ah-ha! I knew you were wrong!"_ could be deemed civil.

At least he was speaking to her, though she wasn't entirely certain she didn't want him to lapse back into silence at this precise moment. Another time his attempts to poke holes in her skepticism regarding the Chantry would have amused her. Now it was just making her temples throb.

"But doesn't this all maybe suggest to you that the Chantry has a point about mages?" he prodded as they made their way through the cellars off the kitchens toward the courtyard.

"Do you want me to say that magic can be dangerous?" she snapped impatiently. "Of course it can. Do you want me to say that mages should be trained to use it safely and responsibly? Of course they should. Do you want me to say it can be abused? Of course it may."

"But?"

"But the Chantry's means of implementing the precepts of the Chant of Light are wrong. Unless you're willing to excuse their treatment of the templars and call it justified?" When Alistair clenched his jaw and shook his head, Rìona gave a satisfied nod. "I didn't think so. Mages can be educated to use magic safely and responsibly, without being hunted down, torn away from their families and imprisoned. Is it possible that some may stray from the teachings of the Chant of Light and become maleficarum? Certainly. But the potential for criminal acts on the part of a few does not justify the enslavement of all. More to the point, Jowan was a Circle mage and he still turned to blood magic, so it seems the Chantry is perhaps not quite as effective at safeguarding against such occurrences as they like to pretend. If a mage can turn maleficar under the watchful eyes of the templars of the Circle tower, honestly, what's the point of imprisoning the mages in the first place?"

He blustered at that, starting to speak a number of times before stopping himself. Finally, Rìona hissed an irritated sigh through her teeth as they approached the door opening from the stairway into the cellars to the courtyard.

"Alistair, I realize you think that if you can prove my views on the fallibility of the Chantry with regards to magic wrong, you will have an easier time denying my views of the Chantry's doctrine regarding carnal matters."

"I'm not trying—" His mouth snapped shut over his protests at Rìona's incredulous stare.

"And as dearly as I would _love_ to spend the afternoon allowing you to try to find some way to translate my sympathy for mages into proof that I'm the whore you've accused me of being," she continued in a sickeningly sweet tone that almost sounded lighthearted and cheerful, but for the fact that it managed to convey absolutely nothing of cheer, "perhaps this entire debate is better left for some other time. For example, when we're not making our way through a castle full of walking decomposed corpses, attempting to rescue your foster-father and his family from an unknown malevolent force."

"Right," he said with a jerky nod. "Another time, then."

It was early afternoon by the time they emerged into the courtyard at the gates of the castle, though the position of the sun and the shadows cast by the high walls surrounding the courtyard made it seem much later, as though it were dusk on a cloudy evening. No. It wasn't that, Rìona thought uneasily, glancing around. Goose-flesh lifted the hair on her arms and she looked about to see Leliana shiver and Alistair rub the back of his neck as though it prickled. Conall crouched low and a subsonic growl began to vibrate within his chest.

It was as though the courtyard was wrapped in twilight, heavy with gloom. Tired though she was from the restless night that had passed before and the constant fighting as they made their way through the castle, that could not account for the sudden heaviness of her arms, urging her to lay down her bow. She saw Sten's sword droop, it's point angling toward the ground rather than raised in guard across his chest.

"Something's here," Alistair said, and the tone of his voice was so decisive, so certain, that it was almost as though another man were speaking. "Something with powerful dark magic."

He drew a deep breath, his eyes narrowed in intense concentration, and then a _ripple_ spread out from him. She could not see it, but she felt it run through her, pushing away the languor that seemed to weigh down her limbs. Rìona stared at him in amazement, because for that instant he almost seemed radiant. His face was calm, composed, confident.

For a moment, she caught a glimpse of the man she had first met at Ostagar, one who had known his place and had _almost_ been on the verge of being sure of himself. She had forgotten that man, because he'd been so different since. Losing Duncan and the Grey Wardens had stripped him of the self-assurance he'd managed to reclaim after the Chantry nearly drummed it all out of him.

In that moment of transcendence, he was so beautiful she nearly wanted to weep at it.

On the far side of the courtyard, the deep shadows resolved themselves into a large armored form. Alistair's eyes widened and beneath his helm he _smiled_ as he charged it, sending out another invisible pulse of force at it that knocked it off its feet for a moment. A number of undead corpses swarmed him as he ran. Sten and Conall charged after him while Rìona and Leliana took aim at the corpses.

Morrigan flung a wave of frost at the large, shadowy creature and cursed when it dissipated with no effect. A moment later she cast another spell. Flames suddenly danced along the blades of Sten and Alistair's swords.

She was chanting a third spell—one Rìona hoped would neutralize the lesser undead until they could dispatch the more powerful one—when Rìona, Leliana, and Morrigan all cried out in surprise, suddenly finding themselves _dragged_ forward by an invisible force into the melee. As they struggled to gain some distance and avoid the swinging blades and flying arrows, Morrigan paralyzed the mob of corpses and Alistair flung the revenant back with another burst of power, calling Andraste's name as he did so.

An arrow bounced off her pauldron and Rìona glanced around to see a number of bow-wielding corpses at the top of the stairs leading to the castle. "Sten!" she shouted over the din. "The archers!"

_"Anaan esaam Qun!"_ The qunari roared, sprinting up the steep stone steps and beheading one of the archers in a single blow. The others thronged around him, but Rìona had no attention to spare as he engaged them. With his sword aflame courtesy of Morrigan's spell, Alistair's swings at the creature were clearly doing much more damage.

"Leliana!" Rìona called, grabbing an arrow from her quiver and setting the end alight with the flames still rising from one of the undead corpses Sten had struck before he turned his attention to the archers. The bard saw what Rìona was doing and quickly followed suit.

The creature roared when Rìona's flaming arrow found a chink between its breastplate and pauldron, and soon thereafter a burning arrow from Leliana's bow embedded itself in the side of the revenant's neck. Alistair knocked it back with his shield and chased after it to bury his sword in its chest. It did not rise again, but lay there as the flames from the arrows and Alistair's sword engulfed it much more quickly than they really ought to have done.

The walking corpses were beginning to break free of Morrigan's paralysis spell, and Conall howled ferociously, stunning them for an instant. Alistair, panting with exertion, whirled to take in the situation and raised his flaming sword again, charging into the fray with a battle cry.

"For the Grey Wardens!"

After the difficulty posed by the revenant, the rest of the risen corpses were almost ridiculously simple. Morrigan scoffed as the last of them fell. But it was Alistair to whom her attention returned. Even now, splattered with gore, he still radiated that aura of assurance that had come over him when he'd first used the templar abilities in which he'd been so assiduously trained. In that moment of combat, that moment of action, there had been no room for self-doubt or awkwardness. He was a brilliant fighter, perhaps the best Rìona had ever seen in action. Better, even, than Ser Gilmore had been.

It struck Rìona just how inferior her own fighting abilities were. Though she was getting better at using her bow at point-blank range, her lack of ability with blades made her a liability in a situation where a bowstring might easily be severed by an errant blade. She was not of the caliber of the normal Grey Warden recruit, that much was certain.

As though he felt her eyes upon him, Alistair looked up. When his eyes met hers, some of that confidence faded, replaced by uncertainty. He frowned and looked as though he might say something, then quickly turned away from her to clean his sword. Stung by his dismissal more deeply than she cared to contemplate, Rìona crossed to the gate and summoned Sten to help haul on the chain that would raise the portcullis to admit Ser Perth and the knights.

_**Reminder:** I will be on vacation from Dec 19 to Jan 6. I will not be posting bi-weekly chapters during that time. I will post two chapters when I get back, on Friday, Jan 7. Happy holidays! _


	15. Chapter Fifteen: Desperate Measures

_Author's Notes: Well, I'm back from vacation and ready to resume posting. There will be two chapters today, as promised, and then we will be back to the twice-a-week schedule starting Monday._

"This, by you, is what is known as an option?" Rìona asked aghast, staring at the blood mage, Jowan, in horror.

"I didn't say it was a _good_ option," he answered somewhat defensively. "But it can be done."

Rìona shook her head, dismissing his words. For a moment she felt as though she was drowning in bad choices. She had guessed right when Lady Isolde had come to the windmill; the malevolent force within the castle _was_ a demon. But what she couldn't have guessed, and what the arlessa had deliberately concealed, was that the demon was possessing her own son, Connor.

The waves of creatures which had attacked the village and killed so many had been summoned and sent forth by a creature that looked like a ten-year-old boy, but whose voice and eyes were filled with an inhuman malice. And the tragedy was that the boy had given himself to the demon willingly, but unknowingly. He'd made a bargain to keep his dying father alive, and now, as a result, he was an abomination, a mage possessed by a demon.

And his mother had known all, and said nothing. She'd begged Bann Teagan to return to the castle with her, knowing what waited within. The demon had quickly taken control of the bann and was using him as a jester. Indeed, it seemed most of the acts of the demon were warped indulgences of a child's whimsy. The demon had prevented his father's death, but kept Arl Eamon unconscious and lost in the Fade so that he would not interfere while the demon summoned an army of undead fiends and sent them into the village. A child's desire, it was, to sit upon the throne and command his own soldiers, but twisted and perverted by the demon's malevolence.

And, for his innocent desire to save his father, Connor might now die.

"There is no other way to deal with an abomination," Alistair had said, before the blood mage had appeared and proposed his alternative. Rìona had thought she might vomit as she considered that child's face. Within it, she could see her nephew Oren, laying in a pool of blood beside his mother. She could see the young pages of Highever Castle—entrusted to the Couslands' care by their unsuspecting parents—slain in their beds by Howe's men. She saw her own child, still a vague, not-quite-real presence within her of which she nonetheless felt fiercely protective. And she saw the ghost of another child, long dead.

How could she possibly contemplate doing such a thing?

But Jowan's alternative was equally vile.

"This is not a discussion!" Rìona spat angrily. "_Maker's balls!_ I am not going to murder a child and I am not going to sanction the commission of a human sacrifice! Or elf, or dwarf, or mabari sacrifice, for that matter. Honestly! Have we all gone bloody insane?"

"It seems a sensible choice," Morrigan observed. "Given a willing sacrifice."

Willing? Oh, yes, Lady Isolde was willing, putting Rìona in the unlikely position of having to defend the arlessa. She would atone for her sins and protect her son; offering her own life's blood in lieu of the lyrium necessary to power the spell which would send a mage into the Fade. There, they might confront the demon possessing Connor without having to kill the boy.

She glared at the witch. "Perhaps the Chantry is right about apostates after all, if this is how cheaply you hold life."

"Whatever we decide, it must be soon," Teagan advised in a very reasonable tone. He nursed a discolored knot on his brow but thankfully had been freed from the demon's control.

"We may not have much of a choice," Alistair said softly. "The demon has to be dealt with, one way or the other."

Rìona whirled, her desperation fueling a rage that made her lash out at him. "Then you choose!" she demanded. "_You_ drive a dagger into that woman's heart. _You_ slit that boy's throat. _You_ decide who will die, and carry out their execution accordingly!"

She glowered at him for a moment as he had the audacity to look stunned by her sudden fury. Finally, she asked disdainfully, "It's not so easy to be pragmatic when the blood is going to be on your own hands, is it?"

In an instant, all that certitude she had been admiring earlier was gone. He dropped his eyes and practically shrank away from her. "No," he muttered. "You're right. That's... not an option. I'm sorry."

She might have felt contrite at having dressed him down so publicly and viciously, had the circumstances been less dire. As it was, she drew a deep breath and announced, "We'll cross the lake and go to the Circle Tower. The mages there will have lyrium for the ritual, correct?"

Jowan nodded, looking miserably resigned. She couldn't really blame him. If the mages came, templars would no doubt escort them, and the blood mage would be taken back to the Tower to be executed or, at the very least, be forced to undergo the Rite of Tranquility. His magic—and all personality and emotion with it—would be forever stilled, if he was allowed to live at all. Though he vowed he wished to atone for his crimes and stop running from the Circle, it was still an awful prospect.

Alistair, however, looked relieved. "We _do_ have a treaty with the Circle mages. We would need to go to the tower sooner or later. It might as well be now."

"It's a day's journey by boat across the lake," Teagan informed them. "I suggest you hurry. Connor will not remain passive forever. I fear you may return to find the village destroyed."

"There was no attack last night," Rìona pointed out. "Perhaps the demon has tired of that particular sport. Keep Jowan here to observe Connor and try to contain him if he starts to become a menace again. Sten will stay as well, to help keep an eye on Jowan and Connor both. For once I can see some good in his unyielding mistrust of mages."

Her mouth drew into a tight frown as she remembered the rumors carried by the dwarven merchant who had made camp with them several nights along the road, about potential trouble at the tower. What if it took them longer than just the time allotted for the journey to secure the Circle's assistance?

Immersed in these thoughts, Rìona wandered out of the Great Hall, seeking the arl's study. She was of the mind to have Bann Teagan dispatch a courier to the Grey Wardens of Orlais with a missive informing them of what all had happened. Of course, that posed its own difficulty. If the message were to be intercepted, Teyrn Loghain might use it to vindicate his paranoia that the Grey Wardens were conspiring with the Orlesians to put Ferelden back under the Orlesian Empire's rule. It would have to be worded very carefully, and even then, there was no guarantee that Loghain's paranoid madness might not still find a way warp its contents to suit his delusions.

She passed through a gallery lined with portraits and suits of plate armor standing at attention. To her right led the stairs to the upper floors of the castle, where Arl Eamon lay possibly dying and the demon-possessed Connor now lurked, seemingly subdued for the moment. At the end of the gallery was the arl's study, surprisingly calm and pleasant after all the difficulty she had encountered in the rest of the castle. Dominated by a large desk, it was lined with bookcases full of gorgeous, leather-bound tomes. Two comfortable-looking armchairs and a chaise were clustered near the hearth and for a moment Rìona was tempted to curl up on the chaise and rest. She found herself staring longingly at it and forced herself to turn to the desk.

"You're being a fool."

"You seem to be saying that a lot these days," Rìona replied nonchalantly, lifting her eyes to meet Morrigan's as the witch stood with her arms crossed in the doorway of the study.

"'Tis true," Morrigan said emphatically. "'Twas true when you chose sentiment over survival and opted not to rid yourself of the babe in your belly, and 'tis true now. You would risk these allies you claim we need so badly, dawdling for days in this filthy, fish-smelling village. And for what? To spare yourself the guilt of having made the sensible choice?"

"I'm making the _political_ choice. Assuming the arl survives the death of the demon keeping him alive in the first place, just how useful as an ally will he be if I kill his son and heir?" Rìona retorted. "How willing to aid me will he be when he learns I allowed his wife to sacrifice herself in a blood magic ritual? You may be wise in the ways of survival, Morrigan, but you know nothing of politics and would be best served to hold your silence!"

Angrily, she jerked open one of the drawers to the arl's desk, searching for parchment and a quill. Her hands shook with rage, the same rage that had fueled her set-down of Alistair. As she rifled through the contents, her fingers chanced upon an amulet and she stared at it in astonishment.

"So your plan is to allow his entire village—including the troops he would summon to your aid—to be killed while you salve your conscience?" Morrigan graced her with a disdainful sneer. "I thought you a more pragmatic sort, when I first met you. Such a pity I have been proven wrong."

"What is it you wish of me, Morrigan?" Rìona demanded, clasping the amulet in her hand and bowing her head wearily.

"If you're minded to listen to one of my obviously unwelcome suggestions, I may just have a solution to your dilemma."

"What is it?" Rìona demanded, her voice far more desperate than she cared to have the witch hear.

"You recall our discussion back in Lothering, do you not? There are more sources of magical energy than lyrium and blood."

"Sexual energy. Yes," Rìona nodded. "Are you saying you could... harness enough of such energy to send a conscious mage into the Fade?"

"Not without a massive orgy, no."

Rìona gave a surprised guffaw. "Appealing as the proposition might be, there is not much chance of that happening. Alistair would die of apoplexy at the mere suggestion."

"Suddenly the idea has more merit than it first seemed to," Morrigan remarked, deadpan.

Favoring the witch with a quelling look, Rìona dropped the amulet she had found into the purse at her waist and prompted, "How is that of use to us, then?"

"Sexual energy could be used to supplement the energy of the blood magic ritual, so that it need not require a human sacrifice," Morrigan explained. "There would still need to be bloodletting, but it should not be so much that it results in the death of the... participant."

"So it's still blood magic, then."

"Aye, 'tis," the witch nodded. "But at least 'twill not require taking a life, and 'twill not require abandoning your arl and his family and village to the questionable mercies of the demon while you go in search of aid."

"What would have to happen, then?"

"'Twould require the mage Jowan conducting his blood magic ritual while I simultaneously harness the sexual energies," she explained. "There may be one participant, the subject of both the bloodletting and the sexual activity, or one for each."

"I suspect volunteers will be scarce for either duty," Rìona said with a wry twist of her mouth.

"Given our company, I suspect you're right. The participant for the sexual element must be capable of finding pleasure amidst distraction and in less-than-erotic circumstances. And if the... _donor_... is the same for both the bloodletting aspect and the sexual aspect, she, or he, must be someone capable of finding pleasure in pain and perversity."

"You're speaking of me."

Morrigan nodded. "There might be several willing to volunteer their blood, starting with this twit Isolde, but none come to mind who would participate in the sex rite."

"But... if I lose too much blood... if something goes amiss, if Jowan cuts too carelessly, I might still perish. Or my babe."

Again, that calm, implacable nod. "Tis a possibility, yes. On the other hand, 'tis also a possibility that your blood is more potent due to the taint you carry. Less might be required to achieve the same effect. But if you are looking for a guarantee of your safety, then no, I cannot provide any such assurance."

"Andraste's mercy," Rìona sighed. "And to think _this_ is the best of my options. As if I needed reminding just how dire circumstances have become."

It should have been a simple decision. Self-sacrifice, Rìona thought morosely, always came easier than risking another. But the babe within her complicated the matter. Risking her own life was a proposition she could face with equanimity, but there was something savagely, viscerally opposed to taking any chances with her babe.

At that moment, through the open door of the study, there was a loud squeal of metal upon metal, and a shout from one of the knights that had entered the castle with Ser Perth. She rounded the desk at a sprint and joined Morrigan in the doorway to see the suits of armor lining the gallery attacking the knight. Ser Perth and the other knights, as well as Alistair, Sten, and Leliana, came running from the Great Hall to join the fray. Conall howled and charged past Rìona's legs to leap upon one of the hollow suits and knock it to the ground.

The fight that ensued was long and difficult. There was no injuring the animated suits of armor. They continued attacking until they were completely hacked apart. Several of Ser Perth's knights took injuries and, almost immediately after the suits of armor had been subdued, Leliana received a wound to her arm when the door to a storeroom behind her opened and the castle's chamberlain ran out and attacked her, followed by a number of the reanimated corpses they had encountered before. After they had been dealt with, Bann Teagan and Arlessa Isolde came into the gallery to survey the carnage.

"Maker's breath!" Isolde gasped, kneeling beside the chamberlain. "Reynaud! But he was alive, not one of those... things."

"I believe he was being controlled, as Bann Teagan was," Rìona replied, shouldering her bow. "Have some of the knights take him to the village to receive his funeral rites with the rest of the dead."

Bann Teagan shook his head as the others filed out. "Apparently the demon possessing Connor is not so passive as we believed," he said, his voice aggrieved as he, too, turned and went back to the Great Hall.

Rìona forced herself to meet Morrigan's expectant gaze.

"You are a Grey Warden," the witch said pitilessly. "Your very reason for being is to defeat the Blight. If you will not risk all for that cause, then you are worse than useless to all of us. Better you should cower in your tent and leave everything up to that fool templar, who at least understands his duty, if you will not do what you know needs be done."

Looking down at the bloodstains on the stone floor of the gallery, Rìona nodded slowly. "What will be required of me?" she asked in resignation.

"Now you are being sensible," Morrigan said with a satisfied nod. "My preference is not for the company of women, but I must be part of the sex rite, for it will be there, at the epicenter of the power, that the Veil shall be opened, allowing me to pass into the Fade. Therefore we shall pleasure ourselves, and each other, while Jowan performs the ritual bloodletting. As the energy builds, as we approach the point of paroxysm, I will open the Veil and enter the Fade."

"Very well, then," Rìona said grimly. "Let's do it. Now, before I have a chance to change my mind. Get Jowan and meet me in the Great Hall."

Alistair balked when Rìona demanded he clear everyone from the hall, glancing mistrustfully between her and Morrigan.

"You're not intending to use yourself as the sacrifice!" he protested. "You can't! You're one of the only two Grey Wardens in Ferelden. We need you alive."

"It is not my intention to die," Rìona replied with a calm she did not feel. "Morrigan thinks she has an alternative. But it will require quiet and privacy so that... so that the mages may concentrate on the spell."

"And what if she comes back possessed?" Alistair insisted. "You haven't seen a Harrowing, the test they put apprentice mages through before they become full mages of the Circle. I have. The mage I saw tested was a strong candidate, and she still became an abomination when they sent her into the Fade to confront a demon. What if Morrigan isn't strong enough?"

Affronted, Morrigan argued adamantly against that possibility, but Alistair would not be moved. "Someone needs to be here to deal with it in case that happens, and last I checked, I'm the only one around with templar abilities."

Rìona shook her head. "You don't want to be here for what's about to happen, Alistair, I promise you that."

He set his jaw stubbornly. "I'm not going anywhere. I don't think it's any secret that I don't trust Morrigan, and I certainly don't trust the blood mage."

"Fine!" Rìona snapped. "Then stay and be damned, but do not even _think_ to interfere unless Morrigan emerges from the Fade as an abomination."

"Perhaps I ought to remain as well," Leliana said gently when Alistair nodded once and walked away. "If Alistair should get... agitated, it might help to have someone here to help him see reason, no?"

Sighing, Rìona nodded. "Very well, but the same goes for you. Please, do not interfere, whatever may happen."

"I'm staying as well," Teagan announced. "This is being done to aid my brother's family. The very least I can do is remain and render what aid I can."

"Please, Teagan..." Rìona began to beg, but suddenly found herself too weary to press the issue. "As you wish. You said you wouldn't question my methods. I am afraid I must test that theory here today. Believe me when I say that this is the best of all our options for dealing with the demon without avoidable loss of life. It is my... sincerest wish that, when all is said and done, you will still be able to look me in the eyes. I will also require your discretion, and your vow that you will not speak of this to anyone."

"You have my word, my lady," he vowed solemnly, and turned his attention to clearing everyone else from the room and setting guards outside the closed doors of the Great Hall. Unsure of how Conall would react once Jowan began the bloodletting, Rìona ordered him out as well.

"You," she said firmly to Alistair. "Stand at the far end of the room and do not move from that spot. Leliana, see that he doesn't."

Without being bidden do so, Teagan joined them, and Rìona waited restlessly before the fire while Morrigan spoke with Jowan and explained to him precisely what she would need. Finally, unable to abide the inactivity of waiting, she removed her weapons and set them aside. She divested herself of her leather gloves and vambraces, her couters and pauldrons. She removed the poleyns buckled around her knees and the boots that buckled up the length of her calves. Finally, as Morrigan turned to join her, she unbuckled her cuirass and removed it, and the leather war skirt as well.

"Wait. Exactly what kind of spell is this?" Alistair demanded, his voice rising as Rìona stood there, the roaring fire on the hearth at her back, in nothing but her linen undershirt and the leather groin covering that she wore over her smallclothes.

"Be silent!" Rìona and Morrigan snapped in unison, as Leliana tried to gently shush him.

Rìona closed her eyes and set her jaw. _I will not be ashamed!_ she reminded herself forcibly. She opened them again to see Morrigan removing her own odd leather leggings and skirt, apparently without embarrassment or concern. Drawing a breath, Rìona untied the leather laces at the sides of her groin covering and lifted her linen shirt over her head. The blazing fire warmed her skin and, as Morrigan pulled off the scant drape of material she wore covering her breasts, Rìona unwound her own breast bindings and pushed her smallclothes down her thighs, kicking them aside.

She and the witch faced one another, nude and wary. There was no intimacy here, nothing to arouse her except the perverse pleasure of being on display for an audience. Remembering Morrigan's admonishment that pleasure was necessary, Rìona drew another long, deep breath and forced herself to push aside her misgivings.

This. This was her power, her strongest skill. Passion and pleasure. She let her eyes assess Morrigan, not as a potential threat, but as a lover. The witch was strangely beautiful, her lips dark and full, her feral eyes that odd, feline compromise between green and gold. Her breasts were high and firm, her waist a lovely, elegant dip that met the flare of her narrow hips. Curls so shiny a black they nearly reflected the firelight formed a delta at the juncture of her thighs.

There was plenty to desire about Morrigan, and though Rìona's own preference tended toward men, now she let herself be aware of the apostate mage in all her sensual beauty. Rìona let desire begin to blossom within her, drowning out self-consciousness and fear.

It was difficult to maintain that desire when Morrigan spoke. "I shall begin by kissing you. Do not mistake it for affection; kissing generates a great deal of sexual energy, and that is all."

And then Morrigan's mouth was upon hers, the witch's tongue parting her lips. Somehow, even her mouth seemed cold and distant. And yet she was a skilled kisser, her lips soft and supple, and Rìona found herself responding, opening to Morrigan's exploring tongue, arching into the hands that rose to cover her breasts.

Over Morrigan's shoulder, she saw Alistair and Teagan, flanking Leliana, all suddenly looking as though the room were far too warm. She closed her eyes, blocking them out. She must forget they were there, or else she'd never be able to do what needed to be done. She wrapped her arms around Morrigan, letting her kiss deepen, letting it settle into the very core of her body, warming her, making her fluid, pliant. Morrigan's fingers delicately pinched Rìona's nipples, creating just enough sensation to border on pain, and then Rìona gasped into her mouth as she felt the quick, hot stroke of Jowan's dagger on her shoulder. She shuddered and tensed at the sudden pain as Jowan began chanting, but even so, wetness made her thighs slide slickly against one another.

She could feel the trickle of blood running down her arm and thought, _Too shallow a cut!_ even as she brought her hands up to cup Morrigan's breasts. She drank in the witch's own shuddering sigh as Rìona's fingernails scraped softly across her hardened nipples. She felt something shift within Morrigan as arousal began to take hold, overriding her grim sense of purpose. Morrigan's body softened, melting into her own. Her arms embraced Rìona, fingers skimming over the satiny skin of Rìona's back. Their breasts pressed together, pliable flesh rubbing against pliable flesh, and Rìona took hold of Morrigan's hips and pulled her in closer, slipping her thigh between Morrigan's legs.

Rìona's head fell back, her hair stroking across her skin and Morrigan's arms as Morrigan began to trail a stream of soft, sucking kisses along Rìona's neck. Then the dagger stuck again, making another slice on Rìona's other shoulder. This stroke was deeper and longer, and a steady stream of warm blood began flowing down her arm and onto the floor.

Rìona cried out, but whether from the pain of being cut or the sudden sensation of Morrigan's cool mouth on her breast, she could not say. At the far end of the hall, she heard Alistair protest and ignored him. Morrigan, for all her professed disinterest in women, made a satisfied sound as she drew Rìona's nipple into her mouth, sucking on it skillfully. Rìona stroked Morrigan's shoulders and arched into the tug of her mouth with a needy moan, each pull of Morrigan's lips creating a pulse of desire between Rìona's thighs. And then Morrigan's hand was at her hip, sliding around, dipping into her sex, stroking her nub. Pleasure mounted, coiling ever more tightly in her belly.

The kiss of the dagger struck her again, this time on the upper curve of the breast Morrigan's mouth had abandoned. Blood flowed down her erect nipple. Morrigan took her other nipple into her mouth while simultaneously increasing the pressure of her caresses, until Rìona bucked and sobbed, hovering on the knife's-edge of release.

And then Morrigan drew away and knelt, and her long, slender fingers slid up into Rìona, causing Rìona to sway on her feet, dizzy with confusion and arousal. Another slice of the dagger on her opposite breast. Another thick stream of blood down her belly. Another thrust of slender fingers, with a thumb stroking her nub. Spasms of pleasure took Rìona unexpectedly, her body tensing and shivering helplessly.

Morrigan roughly scraped the nails of her free hand down the inside of Rìona's thigh. Another orgasm followed on the heels of the first and Rìona's legs would not support her. Morrigan guided her to the floor, spreading her out. She leaned over Rìona again and kissed her, deeply, her hands returning again to Rìona's nipples, which were now slick with copious rivulets of her own blood. She was unaware of Jowan kneeling beside her, still chanting, until the dagger sliced across her upper arm, biting deep. More blood flowed, and another tremor rocked her body.

Somewhere in the recesses of her mind, a panicked voice fretted that she would soon be losing too much blood, if this went on much longer and her wounds were not bound. With each stroke of his dagger, Jowan got bolder, cut more deeply. She couldn't be sure if it was because he wasn't getting enough energy, or if he was simply losing control of the power he was harnessing. Blood was streaming onto the rug upon which she lay, saturating it. The dagger sliced her again, this time at the top of her shoulder, dangerously close to the artery in her neck.

She had to do something to stop this.

If the sexual energy was supplementing the energy released by the bloodletting, then surely _more_ sexual energy would mean less blood would be required. But Rìona was the only one giving her passion and pleasure to the rite. Morrigan's touch was skilled, but still distant. The witch was offering no energy of her own to the endeavor, beside the effort required to pleasure Rìona. But if pleasure was required, then no one was more skilled at its application than Rìona herself.

Without really intending to do it, she pulled Morrigan down upon her and rolled until she had the witch pinned beneath her.

"I must not—!" the witch began to protest, but Rìona cut her off with a kiss, claiming possession of that lovely mouth with its sharp, venomous tongue. Rìona thrust her own tongue deep into Morrigan's mouth, digging her fingers into Morrigan's hair and pulling it free from its coil as she sucked and bit at those dark crimson lips. It was a long moment before the tension left the witch, but eventually she surrendered to that kiss, and only then did Rìona release her mouth, hissing with the next bite of the dagger on the back of one thigh and then the other.

Morrigan lifted her hands, pushing at Rìona's shoulders, but Rìona caught those long, slender fingers in her own and pinned them next to the witch's head as she nibbled her way down Morrigan's neck. The witch whimpered in pleasure when Rìona bit hard enough to cause pain and Rìona smiled against her pale skin. She released one of Morrigan's hands and took Morrigan's nipple between her fingers, pinching until the apostate mage writhed and struggled.

Another stroke of the dagger at the side of Rìona's waist, just over her hip. Rìona screamed, knowing it to be a serious wound both from the pain and from the immediate torrent of blood that began to flow. Sobbing in desperation, she redoubled her efforts.

"Chant!" she gasped and took Morrigan's nipple into her mouth, sucking hard. Morrigan's breathless voice began the chant Rìona had heard that day in the stable at Lothering, rising and falling with each pull of Rìona's lips upon her nipple. When Rìona's fingers skated down Morrigan's flat belly, she found those dark curls wet and slick. Her fingers parted them, delving between to bury themselves inside the witch in a hard thrust. Morrigan's hips came up off the bloody floor and she cried out, then resumed her chant, her voice ragged and panting.

Rìona changed breasts, sucking at Morrigan's other nipple as Morrigan moved sinuously beneath her, the chant she spoke getting louder and more desperate, punctuated by impassioned cries. Rìona pumped her fingers in and out, the heel of her palm grinding against the witch's mound. She felt Morrigan shudder and clench around her fingers, pausing for a moment in her chanting to cry out her pleasure. A tingling numbness was beginning to invade Rìona's extremities, and a buzzing was growing louder in her ears. She _must_ generate more energy. She could not afford to lose much more blood.

No sooner had Morrigan's shudders subsided then Rìona kissed her way down Morrigan's body, tasting her own blood on the witch's skin along the way. She stroked her tongue over the pulsing nub of pleasure as her fingers curled in a come-hither gesture within Morrigan.

There was something spicy and wild and not at all unpleasant in the taste of the witch, and Rìona lapped at her avidly, urgently. Morrigan jolted when Rìona screamed directly against her nub as Jowan's dagger sliced again. She worked her tongue faster, harder, stroked more insistently with her fingers. Morrigan's fingers clenched in Rìona's hair, her hips lifted to grind her sex against Rìona's face. Her voice was high and shrill as she continued her chant. Her entire body was flushed, sweating, tense, trembling...

"Now, Jowan!" Rìona cried, thrusting out her arm and offering him her wrist an instant before she began to suck hard upon Morrigan's nub. She felt the stroke of the dagger cutting open her wrist. Blood poured from the wound and Morrigan shouted a new word, something sharp and pregnant with power. To Rìona's surprise, Jowan spoke the same word at the same instant. Rìona was flung back, away from the witch. A bright bluish glow surrounded Morrigan, swirling and sparkling. Her nude body lay rigid, covered in Rìona's blood and nearly levitating off the floor.

Immediately Jowan was there, casting a healing spell upon Rìona. Warm energy prickled through her body, accompanied by an itching sensation as the worst of her wounds began to knit shut. Bright lights were flaring in her hazy vision, and the buzzing in her ears grew louder. Cold. She felt so very cold. Distantly, she was aware of Leliana hurrying forward, tearing strips of linen from Rìona's discarded undershirt to bandage and bind the rest of her wounds. And then Teagan was beside her as well with a goblet of water.

"Thank the Maker," Jowan sighed in relief. "That was close."

Rìona tried to rise to her feet but found herself too weak and dizzy. Teagan caught her as she swayed and guided her to a chair. "How are you feeling, my lady?"

Despite the proffered water, her mouth was strangely dry, making speech difficult. "Thirsty," she said, and Leliana rushed to fetch another goblet of water.

"It's from the blood loss," Jowan advised. "Stopping the bleeding won't restore the blood you've lost. I've a restorative tea I can make, but I'm out of mana to heal her."

"Is there anything else you can do?" she heard Teagan ask, though Rìona found she was too sleepy to care much about the question or the answer. She lay her head against the back of the chair and closed her eyes, drifting.

Whatever the answer was, she did not hear it.


	16. Chapter Sixteen: Bitch

Rìona woke to find herself ensconced in one of the castle's bedchambers, nude beneath the coverlet and fine linen sheets. The first face her eyes chanced upon was Leliana's. The bard sat at her bedside, humming softly. The melody stopped and she smiled. "Andraste be praised, she's awake. I told you she'd be fine, Alistair!"

Blinking blearily, she scanned the room until she spied Alistair, standing with his arms crossed before the fireplace. He looked concerned but remote, as though he was deliberately keeping his distance.

"Connor?" she rasped, licking parched lips.

"Connor is well," another voice answered from her opposite side, and her eyes slid in that direction to land upon Bann Teagan, who looked down on her solemnly from a face that seemed paler than normal. "He awoke not long ago and doesn't remember much of what has happened. He seems much the same boy he's always been. Eamon is still alive, but he is also still unconscious. The death of the demon did not kill him as we feared it might, but neither has it made him better."

"And how is Morrigan?" Her voice was stronger on her second attempt to speak.

"Still asleep," Leliana replied. "Jowan says she could stay that way for some time. Apparently going conscious into the Fade is an effort for mages and it takes them a while to recover."

"And my... injuries?" It was on the tip of her tongue to ask after her babe, but she was mindful of Teagan's presence. She wasn't certain she wanted the knowledge of her pregnancy spread around yet.

Leliana paused for a thoughtful moment, then gave a very circumspect answer. "Jowan healed you _very_ quickly. When he was out of mana, he sacrificed some of his own blood to power his healing spells. He also knew a spell to drain health from one person and grant it to another. The bann here is looking a bit peaked now, is he not? As you healed, you regained your color, as though the blood loss were being reversed. You should be fully recovered and we are hopeful that no... _other_ complications... will arise."

"I see." Rìona nodded slowly. She supposed that was the best she could hope for, all things considered.

"Once you're on your feet again, we should discuss what is to be done about Eamon's condition," Teagan proposed, a grim look on his face. "For now I must go check on matters down in the village and with Connor and Isolde. Come see me when you have recovered your strength. And... thank you, my lady."

He turned and left without another word, and Rìona frowned as she stared at the door to the bedchamber as it closed behind him. She could find in his behavior no hint of the warmth and kindness she'd known from him the previous night in the chantry.

Sighing, she turned her attention back to Leliana and Alistair.

"We need to talk," Alistair announced, his voice hard and determined as he strode forward. "About what happened down there in the Great Hall."

"You were there, Alistair," Rìona said simply. "You saw what happened."

"I saw it, but I'm not sure I understand it. You participated in a _blood magic ritual_. How could you do that?"

"Should I have killed Connor, then?" Rìona asked, her voice hardening as she met his outraged gaze. "Or risked the arl's family and the village to seek aid at the Circle Tower?"

"Yes. Maybe. I don't know!" He ran a hand over his copper-gold hair in frustration. "But blood magic! And then... with _Morrigan_?"

"It's not something I particularly relished doing, you know," she snapped defensively.

"Oh, really? Because that's not what it looked like."

She sat up on the bed, glaring at him as she clutched the coverlet over her breasts. "Think what you like, but I assure you, had I a better option, I would have taken it."

"I don't even know what that was!" he shouted.

"Morrigan has the ability to harness magical power from sexual energy. Apparently it's a skill she was taught by Flemeth, whom we all know from legend was a great and seductive beauty," Rìona explained, struggling to remain calm beneath the barrage of his indignation. "It was the only way we could get Morrigan into the Fade today, without taking time to journey to the Tower, so that she could defeat the demon without killing the boy or sacrificing a life."

"That doesn't make it any less obscene!" Alistair argued, ignoring Leliana's shocked gasp. "And in Arl Eamon's own hall! I just... don't see how you could have done such a thing." He shook his head in disgust. "I owe the arl more respect than that."

Rìona's lips twisted in a bitter smile. "Alistair, I did the best I could with an absolutely abysmal array of choices. Connor is alive, the demon is gone, and Redcliffe Village is saved. I'm sorry if my means offend your delicate sensibilities, but I have no time nor inclination to coddle you. It was _my_ blood that was shed today, _my_ dignity and possibly my credibility that was sacrificed, _my_ child whose existence I have risked to save these people I hardly know." Angrily she used the back of her hand to dash away tears which rose far too readily to her eyes. "So you may spare me your protestations. You'll find that your issues with the arl carry remarkably little weight with me at this moment."

Leliana jumped up from her perch at the edge of the bed and put a restraining hand on Alistair's arm. "This discussion is accomplishing nothing," she said, a hint of warning in her tone. "Alistair, go check on our guest down in the dungeons while I tell your fellow Grey Warden what happened at the inn as she was sleeping."

His jaw clenching and flexing in agitation, Alistair gave a brusque nod and stormed from the room, leaving Rìona alone with Leliana.

"What guest in the dungeons?" she asked, after Leliana allowed her a moment of silence to collect her thoughts. "What happened at the inn?"

"Come, I will explain as I help you dress, if you feel up to leaving bed, that is."

Nodding, Rìona rose, finding that she felt strong and actually quite energetic. Jowan's healing had clearly been very effective. Leliana brought her a clean linen undershirt. It was finely made and had a feminine cut to it. There were also clean linen strips for binding her breasts, and new smallclothes. She looked at Leliana, confused by the new garments.

"While you were resting, the bann said we were to help ourselves to anything we need to re-provision, and to employ any services in the village we require at his expense," the bard explained. "Owen the blacksmith is repairing some of the dents and bent links in Alistair's chainmail and Sten's plate, and sharpening Oathkeeper and Sten's broadsword. I've sent our leathers out to the leather-worker to be cleaned and repaired as well and our boots to be resoled by the cobbler."

Rìona blinked. "You've been busy while I was asleep. Thank you. But what's this about the inn?" she prompted, tying off her breast bindings and slipping the linen shirt over her head.

"Oh, yes! I nearly forgot. The inn!" Leliana offered her a bright smile. "Since the cook and most of the scullions here at the castle were slain, we went there for dinner and to collect our things to stay tonight in the castle. It was then that I noticed the elf that was staying at the inn, Berwick, was paying particularly close attention to us. Well, I wasn't a bard for years without learning to recognize a spy when I see one, and Berwick wasn't even particularly good, yes? His story about waiting for his brother and being stranded in the village by the attacks was full of holes. He got very nervous when I pressed him, and admitted that he was hired to keep an eye on the castle. So we brought him up to the castle for... safekeeping... until you or the bann were available to question him."

Hurriedly, Rìona pulled on the linen breeches Leliana offered her since her armor was being cleaned and repaired. "Will he corroborate Jowan's story about being hired by Loghain to poison the arl, do you think?"

"If he can, it would be much better than simply relying on the word of an admitted maleficar as proof, _non?_" Leliana answered, sounding quite pleased with herself. Quickly Rìona stepped into the soft leather boots she suspected were being donated from the arlessa's wardrobe for her use, while the cobbler repaired her own, and rushed down to the dungeons.

Berwick the elf knew nothing about Loghain nor of the arl's poisoning, but claimed to have been hired to spy on the castle and report any changes or news by the new Arl of Denerim, none other than Rendon Howe himself.

"He's the teyrn's right-hand man!" Berwick protested, pacing his cell. "So I didn't do anything wrong!"

"Have you any proof of this?" Rìona demanded, feeling fury flood her body at the mere mention of Arl Howe. Loghain's right-hand man? A nagging sense of unease tickled the back of her mind. How had Howe managed that sudden rise in prominence? Was he being rewarded for his attack on Highever? If so, what fiction had he fed the teyrn to justify it?

"Right here," Berwick said, producing a letter from his pack. "Can I go now?"

The wax seal on the parchment bore not the device of the arling of Denerim, but the bear of the arling of Amaranthine. Howe's personal seal.

The contents confirmed Berwick's claims, but it was the date which caught her eye.

"This is dated from early Firstfall," she murmured. "Before Ostagar. Sweet Andraste's mercy!"

"What? What is it?" Alistair asked in confusion.

Rìona looked at him with eyes that shone with tears, but she could not share her relief with him, for he did not know the doubts which had plagued her.

"Release him," she said instead, gesturing to Berwick. "Return to Howe at your peril," she told the elf as a guard unlocked the gate to his cell. "He is not likely to reward the news you bring him in the manner he promised. Treachery is the coin in which he deals."

She practically ran from the dungeon and up the stairs to the arl's study. Bann Teagan was not there, and so she frantically searched the castle until she found him in his chambers, seated before the hearth and staring into the fire. A chambermaid was just leaving the room, bearing empty buckets of water and on the far side of the chamber, the basin steamed invitingly.

"It wasn't me!" she cried, closing the door behind her for privacy. So overwhelming were her relief and elation that she did not at first notice the tense set of his jaw, or his angry glare, when she burst through the door.

"What do you mean?" he demanded shortly.

"Arl Eamon's poisoning, Howe's murder of my family... it all began _before_ Ostagar, to clear the way for Loghain's bid for power. He set his plan in motion long before I ever arrived at Ostagar. It was _not_ my actions with the king that drove him to treason! He intended it all along!"

The bann's expression softened, though only slightly. "I see. Well, that's... a relief, I am sure. Perhaps we can talk about it another time?"

Rìona blinked slowly, taken aback by the barely-polite dismissal. Teagan had already turned his back to her again. His elbows rested upon his knees, his head hung low between his shoulders, and he cradled in his hands a cup of something she suspected was far stronger than wine.

"My lord bann?" she inquired softly.

"I'm sorry, my lady," he answered without looking at her. "I'm not fit company tonight. I pray you'll excuse me."

Her first inclination was to leave, Alistair's words echoing in her ears. _Disgrace! Obscene! Perversion!_ Of course, Teagan was now repulsed by her. She should have known this would happen. After what he had seen her do, no doubt he could barely stand the sight of her.

She just hadn't imagined him to be the same sort of narrow-minded prude that Alistair was, and it hurt to realize she was wrong.

She turned and her hand had fallen upon the handle of the door to his chamber before she paused. There was more at stake here than merely one man's good opinion. Bann Teagan was a strong voice in the Landsmeet, and in opposition of Teyrn Loghain, and his influence would be that much greater if Arl Eamon did not survive and Teagan assumed the mantle of Arl of Redcliffe. She _needed_ him. She couldn't simply allow his contempt to stand; she needed to know she would have his support.

"Have I lost an ally for my labors today, Teagan?" she asked, approaching his chair.

"I beg your pardon?" He looked back up at her in surprise.

"You've not been the same since I regained consciousness," Rìona said frankly. "Clearly what transpired today repulsed you, just as it did Alistair. But before I relieve you of the unwanted burden of my presence, I should like to know, quite honestly, if I still have your support against Loghain."

"What?" The bann rose, surprise and agitation plain upon his face as he set the cup on the mantle. "You've quite mistaken the matter, I assure you! How—how could I possibly be anything less than entirely grateful for all you've done for my family and the people who look to us?"

"That you feel gratitude for what I've done by no means prevents you from also being revolted by it." Rìona looked at him steadily, determined to maintain a dignified presence before him. If she let him think her ashamed, or humbled, by what she had done, it would only confirm his conviction that she had behaved disgracefully. "Despise me for my actions if you must, my lord bann, but do not throw your support to Loghain just to spite me."

"Maker's breath! My lady—_Rìona_—" Striding forward, he took her shoulders in his hands, squeezing gently. "I promise you, I am considering nothing of the sort. What you did today, you did to save my family, and I vow to you that I think no less of you for it. If Alistair disapproves, I'm terribly sorry and I hope someday he can see his way clear to understanding, as I do, that what you did, you did out of dire necessity. My... _preoccupation_... comes from another direction entirely."

"I see." She was unable to resist the sigh of relief that trickled from her lips. "Well. You were a confidante when I needed one last night, Teagan. If my presence is not, in fact, odious to you, then... perhaps I might return the favor?"

"You are very generous, my lady," he said, taking one of her hands and pressing a gallant kiss upon the back of it. "I think I shall take you up on that offer. Please, be seated. May I offer you some wine?"

"Thank you."

"Isolde approached me, while you were unconscious," Teagan explained. He poured a cup of wine for her from a flagon on the table and then took his cup of spirits from the mantle and reclaimed the chair in which she had first found him. "Perhaps some history is in order, before I tell you what transpired. When Eamon first wed Isolde, I was much younger. I was immediately smitten with his beautiful young bride. Isolde was clearly unhappy to be far away from home and wed to a much older man, and I think my infatuation gave her some comfort. She was amused and flattered by it. Nothing ever came of it, of course. She was too pious and I would never dishonor my brother in such a way, even if she hadn't been. But she let me trail around after her like an eager puppy until I finally outgrew the whole thing.

"Over the years, she's made it apparent that she still expects the sort of doting admiration from me that I lavished upon her in those early days of her marriage. At times she has resented that I no longer seem inclined to dance attendance on her quite so readily. She vacillates between disdaining me and trying harder to win me over again, sometimes skirting the very edge of propriety but never stepping beyond it, so that she may convince herself she's still a chaste and virtuous wife to my brother. Until this afternoon."

There was something harsh and bitter in Teagan's tone, before he paused in his tale to drain the dregs from his cup. Rìona waited patiently for a long, silent moment, and finally prompted, "What happened today?"

"She... offered herself to me."

"I see."

"She claims it was out of gratitude, for helping save her and Connor, and that she's always loved me and wanted me." Teagan shook his head with a rueful smile. "I've grown too old and cynical to believe it."

Rìona could think of any number of reasons for Arlessa Isolde to have attempted such a thing, but she would not allow her opinions to color the bann's. "Why, then, do you think she did it?"

"She fears losing her place as arlessa," he replied, rolling his empty silver cup back and forth between his palms. "Destined for life in the Circle of Magi as he now is, Connor can no longer inherit the arling. If Eamon should die, I shall be the only available heir to Redcliffe, for Isolde is not of Guerrin blood. I would take care of her, of course, or she could return to her family in Orlais if she desired, but if I take a wife, she would displace Isolde's authority. Therefore, Isolde wants to be certain that if I inherit Redcliffe, she will be my first choice for a wife. Perhaps she even wants to conceive my child to insure her place. And, I think, she fears she might have competition from you."

Rìona scoffed, struggling to subdue the alarm that rose in her breast at his words. She could not allow him to persist in such a thought. "Don't be absurd!"

"Is it truly so far-fetched?"

"It is!" she declared firmly. "You know who I am, Teagan. You know what I am, and what I've done. Even if I were not a Grey Warden, I am no fit wife for any man."

"I think you give yourself far too little credit, my lady," the bann answered.

"Do you indeed?" Rìona asked incredulously. "Am I so very different from Isolde, do you think? You know what I did with Cailan at Ostagar. I set out to seduce him and win my place by his side every bit as calculatedly as you think Lady Isolde may have done with you today."

"You mustn't say that!" Teagan thrust himself up out of his chair to pace before the fire, his movements sharp with irritation. "You are nothing like her!"

"Don't idealize me, Teagan!" she snapped, rising to face him. If the bann began to consider marriage or a future with her, it would be disastrous. "In the final analysis, Isolde and I are much the same. Only our motivations are different. She would play the harlot to secure her title. I've done it to sway the mind of a king. I freely confess I'd rather be a harlot with live allies than face the coming turmoil alone and supported by naught but my high ideals and chastity. "

"You saved us!" the bann protested. "You could have let Connor and Isolde die rather than subject yourself to such... _rank_ indignity."

"I am not so altruistic as that. You and Arl Eamon and Redcliffe, you have something I need: voices in the Landsmeet and troops to battle the Blight."

"Again, I say you give yourself too little credit. You could have met your ends and still allowed Connor or Isolde to die. I saw you, as you argued against killing either of them. You fought for their lives when the easier, and less personally degrading, road would have been to let one of them die."

Unable to deny his words without another confession, Rìona bowed her head.

"So many people have died because of that bitch's actions. And then to propose we dishonor my brother mere feet from his own bedchamber! I'm furious with her. I find myself wishing you had allowed her to sacrifice herself rather than..."

"Rather than grovel on my belly in the middle of the Great Hall like a bitch myself?"

Teagan whirled on her, his eyes wild and desperate. "You must not say such things about yourself!"

"It was easy to pretend last night in the chantry, wasn't it, Teagan?" Rìona murmured as she drew nearer to him. "You didn't see me at Ostagar, you didn't see how very easily I wrapped the king about my finger. You didn't see just how wanton I could be, as I was today with Morrigan. It was easy to pretend I was pure and noble when the extent of my debauchery was merely an abstract concept. But today, you saw it. You saw me there on my hands and knees like a bitch in heat, saw my pleasure even as I was on display for the lot of you, and now you can't pretend anymore."

"You shouldn't have done it!" he shouted, grabbing her shoulders and shaking her until she staggered. "You shouldn't have _had_ to do it. If not for Isolde, none of it would have been..."

"Isolde has nothing to do with the fact that I am a slut. I was cast in that mold long ago."

"But that bitch..."

"... Is not the one you saw rolling around on the floor of the Great Hall today. If I am to be the standard by which you measure Lady Isolde, best you take my own measure first. I know very well all that I am and all that I am not. I am no hypocrite, Bann Teagan Guerrin. Are you?"

His mouth crashed onto hers, and she opened beneath him, eagerly, hungrily, letting herself be devoured and devouring in return. He tasted of whiskey and desperation. His hands around her upper arms may not have been those of a hardened warrior, but they were strong nevertheless, and closed upon her with bruising force.

"Whore!" he panted, pressing kisses across her face.

"Yes."

His mouth traveled down her neck, licking and biting. "Slut!"

Rìona closed her eyes and her head fell back, passion washing over her, blazing through her. "Yes..." she breathed.

His hands jerked at the laces closing the neck of her linen shirt and then dropped, surging up underneath the hem of it to push it up. Rìona let him shove it over her head, let it fall to the floor, dropped by his careless hands that were already pulling at her breast bindings.

There was a glorious, cathartic exultation in his rage, in the barely-contained violence of his touch. Her nerves sang with it. She let it feed her own desire, let it wash away the powerlessness and frustration she'd felt when confronted with her choices earlier in the day.

"Bitch!" Teagan spat, lifting his head from where he bit at the crook of her neck to glare at her.

Rìona opened her eyes, met his angry gaze proudly. Her hand dropped low and cupped his erection through his breeches. "If I am a bitch, then it is a bitch you desire."

His eyes darkened with rage and lust. They widened as they took in the sight of her, the brown flakes of crusted blood smeared and trailing across her skin. "You have not bathed."

"Does a bitch bathe herself, or does the kennel-master do it for her?" she asked, canting her head to one side.

Grabbing her upper arm cruelly, he began to drag her toward the basin, only to stop and fling her to the stone floor. "If you're a bitch, then come to heel, crawling on your belly as is proper."

Her face crimson, Rìona obeyed, slowly crawling after him as he crossed the chamber. Her humiliation was keen and glorious as she crawled, but she did not struggle against it. He sat at the edge of the basin and pulled off his soft hide boots and the wool stockings beneath. "A good bitch licks her master's feet, does she not?"

Rìona shuddered as a cramping surge of desire rocked through her at his words. She squeezed her eyes shut, feeling a mad rush of power and pleasure in this unaccustomed sense of debasement. She slowly turned on her hands and knees and dipped her head, stroking the top of his foot with a long, slow sweep of her tongue.

His skin was soft and fine, made rough only by a thin patch of coarse hair. Teagan groaned, his hands balling into fists beside his thighs on the stone-work ledge, and Rìona understood that the caress was actually pleasurable for him. She turned her attention to the other foot, taking her time as she dragged her tongue along it. As she began licking up the sides of his feet, and poking daintily with her tongue between his toes, he gave a strangled sound and drove his fists hard into his thighs. A quick glance at his straining breeches showed the urgency of his need.

She opened her mouth and drew his toes inside, sucking on them one after the other while he groaned. She drew out the process, using suction and strokes of her tongue to draw out his pleasure. His entire body began to quiver, and she knew he was on the edge, but still she persisted, until at last he pulled his foot away.

"No!" Teagan gasped. He surged abruptly to his feet and hauled her bodily up off the floor. He untied the drawstring to her breeches and pushed them, along with her smallclothes, off her hips while she kicked off her own soft boots and stockings. Then he lifted her bodily and dumped her unceremoniously into the still steaming bath.

Scarcely had she caught her breath after she rose from beneath the water, spluttering and coughing, than he took up a linen cloth, soaped it, and began to scrub her. He spared no effort for gentleness, rubbing her so roughly at times it felt he would scour off her skin, until every nerve on her body tingled and burned. A few minor wounds Jowan had not bothered to heal opened and began to bleed again, creating small rivulets down her body as the blood sluiced down her skin with the water. The cloth soon turned pink, and still he scrubbed, until the only blood on her was fresh and new, all the old flakes melted and washed away.

Rìona cried out when he shoved the cloth between her legs and began to wash her with cruel, hard swipes. It didn't take long until she trembled on the brink of orgasm, rocking her hips in time to the strokes of the cloth. When he dropped the cloth into the water and abruptly thrust two fingers into her and spread them, opening her wide to let the water rush in and clean her, she was undone. Overcome by shame and sensation, with a ragged sob she came, seizing around his fingers, shuddering as small pink drops of bloody water made their way down her skin. Her shaking had nearly eased when she felt his tongue on her shoulder and realized he was licking the fresh blood welling from a wound. She came again, a choked cry erupting from her throat, clinging to him until his silken doublet and breeches were wet and stained.

With the scouring, Rìona felt her sense of mortification wash away. If his treatment of her was degrading, then this, at least, was a degradation she had chosen, and she reveled in it.

He kissed her, thrusting his tongue into her mouth like a spear, and she could taste her blood on him. His fingers pumped in and out of her, but the water and scrubbing had washed away most of her own fluids, and there was more friction to the caress than she was accustomed to. She was soon mewling in discomfort, seeking to pull herself out of the water.

"Do you want me to fuck you, little whining bitch?" he hissed in her ear.

"Yes... Maker, yes, _please_," she begged, rising up on her knees in the water, her hands greedily pulling at the laces of his breeches.

Abruptly, he rose to his feet. She would have tumbled back into the bath had she not caught herself, and she looked up as he peeled off his sodden breeches and doublet. Teagan stroked himself slowly, and Rìona watched, transfixed

"Shall I have you on your hands and knees like a good bitch?" he mused. Her sex pulsed in approval of the notion, beyond caring for inane matters such as her own degradation, if it meant she'd have him within her soon. Obligingly, she rose and stepped from the bath, sinking to her knees on the rug beside the stone pool. She lowered her head and shoulders to the floor so that only her rear was elevated and exposed. She buried her face against the rug, suddenly noticing that it, too, was stained with pink droplets of bloody water from the bath.

Then he was behind her, prodding at her. Another spasm of desire rocked Rìona as she considered the image she must present, groveling there on the carpet. And yet... there was something pure in this debasement, something that made her revel in it, rather than cower in shame.

He worked himself into her with slow pushes and nudges, until he was seated deep within her, the sharp bones of his hips pressing against the knife wounds on her buttocks. The salt of his sweaty skin stung the open slices, but the discomfort was lost amongst the cascade of sensation.

She shuddered and rocked against him, trembling on the brink of release, awaiting just the smallest touch to send her reeling into a shattering climax. Teagan pushed back in response, lodging himself even more deeply within her and they moaned in unison. Already she could feel him beginning to swell and grow even harder, and she knew he wouldn't last long. Impatiently she wriggled against him, seeking more. At last he drew back, and back, all the way out. Rìona sobbed in frustration, suddenly unbearably empty, but just as quickly he pushed in again. He pulled her hips back to meet his thrust and rammed into her with no attempt at restraint.

"Yes..." she hissed, rocking back and forth on her hands and knees, meeting the hard, sharp thrusts of his hips to drive him ever deeper within.

"Is this how the bitch likes to be fucked?" Teagan grated. "Or is it more like _this_?"

He leaned forward, his arms bracketing her ribs as he leaned over her, pressing his chest to her back, and suddenly his thrusts were short, quick, rapid, dragging across that spot within that made everything so much more intense. She felt the sting of his tongue on the knife slice on her shoulder at the same moment his hand snaked around her hip to find her nub. She disintegrated, crying out and sobbing, driving back with her hips as spasm after spasm rolled through her, until all she could do was press her face into the rug and moan.

As the waves began to subside, Teagan pushed himself back up and took up a rhythm of deep, hard thrusts, filling her over and over as she clenched around him. At length, he groaned, his body going rigid, wracked with shudders. She felt him pulse and throb deep within her, and suddenly she began to weep. Since the day she had awakened to the belief that she had caused the disaster at Ostagar, she'd carried a burden on her conscience that not even her earlier realization had entirely erased. And now, somehow, she felt cleansed and finally, _truly_ shriven.

The catharsis had not merely been Teagan's own, she knew. Not by any measure.

Teagan placed kisses along her back, his sweaty skin sliding against hers, and it was a long moment before he withdrew from her. Rìona pushed herself up, wiping the tears from her face as she rolled over to sit and grant some reprieve to her aching arms and knees. Teagan looked a sight, smeared with blood as she herself was, and yet... when he opened his eyes, they were calm and kind once more. He reached out, touched her face tenderly, drew her close and gratefully she went to him, moving into his kiss.

They bathed together, then, rinsing the blood from their skin. Teagan gently washed her re-opened wounds and dabbed salve upon them and then, over her protests, he bore her to bed and wrapped himself around her, kissing every part of her that he could reach as he held her with her back against his chest.

"You're so young for all you have done, all you have to do," he murmured. "And yet... I could fall in love with you."

"You mustn't. I beg you not to," Rìona whispered, a shiver running through her. "We are in a land tearing itself apart and trembling on the brink of destruction. Passion comes easily in such desperate times, but it burns out quickly. There's no certainty in my future, absolutely no way I can be a wife, nor even a proper lover. You will only come to hate me for what I cannot give you."

"I know," he answered. "Instead, I will pray that you come through it all safely, and I shall always be grateful for everything you have done already. Promise me you will come back and be with me again, even if you don't stay."

"I promise you, I will _try_."

It occurred to her as she drifted off to sleep that it was the first night she'd ever spent in the arms of a man. She slept soundly, untroubled but for dreams of the archdemon, to which she was almost becoming accustomed. She rose before dawn and dressed, coaxing Teagan to go back to sleep and leaving for her own chamber, where she was wretchedly ill before the maid finally arrived with a tray of bread and cheese. In a way, being sick was a relief, giving her hope that perhaps her child had not succumbed to the previous day's ordeal.

Their armor and weapons repaired and their supplies re-provisioned, the party was ready to leave after the funeral rites for the fallen villagers were held. The bodies were laid carefully upon kindling-laden rafts and set adrift upon the lake, where flaming arrows then ignited them in homage to Andraste who had burned upon a pyre. Rìona and her company watched the ceremony from the shoreline while Teagan, Isolde and Connor stood upon the docks and led the processional back the the chantry when it was over.

Once the burning rafts had all drifted out of sight, they departed for Kinloch Hold, island seat of the tower which imprisoned the Circle of Magi in Ferelden under the watchful eyes of the Chantry's templars. Arlessa Isolde had not liked that they were not leaving immediately for Denerim, to seek out the scholar the arl had once employed, a Brother Genitivi. Healing magic had made no difference to the arl's condition, nor had any other efforts to revive him succeeded. In desperation, Lady Isolde espoused the opinion that the Ashes of Andraste, a relic purported to carry great healing powers, was the only chance remaining to cure her husband. Brother Genitivi claimed to have proof of its location, and with no other options left to him, Teagan had agreed that it was at least worth the effort.

Skeptical, but lacking in any suggestion that might be more useful, Rìona had agreed to search for the artifact after she had checked upon the Circle Tower. Rumors were still trickling in about some sort of trouble there, and the mages were far too powerful as potential combatants against the Blight to be neglected if there might be difficulty. Accordingly, Rìona had overruled Lady Isolde's protests and determined to visit the tower before continuing east to Denerim.

They journeyed by boat across Lake Calenhad to save themselves several days travel. It was not the best-advised course of action, for the winter wind on the lake was bitterly cold, and harsh enough to be dangerous. Bann Teagan had made certain to equip them with as many spare cloaks and blankets as he could scrounge together in the village. And so Rìona and her company huddled shivering on the deck of the small sailing vessel, taking turns to retreat to the single, small cabin below deck to warm themselves by the inadequate brazier and rest upon the hammocks slung for the crew.

They had been on the lake nearly all day when Rìona remembered what she had found in Arl Eamon's study the day before. Reaching into her belt-pouch, she withdrew the amulet, etched with the symbol of Andraste. Though her pride still stung from Alistair's tirade the day before, she forced herself to approach him. If there was going to be discord between the two surviving Grey Wardens in Ferelden, it would not be of her own making.

He sat beside the brazier in the small cabin, eating hard-baked bread and a wedge of cheese and looking morose.

"I found this in Arl Eamon's study yesterday," she said softly, holding out the amulet. "It looked like the one you told me about. The one you threw and broke when the arl announced you were being sent to the monastery. See the solder lines? It's been repaired."

"My mother's amulet?" Carefully he took the pewter disc from her and turned it over in his fingers. "Maker's breath, it is! Why would the arl have kept it, much less have it repaired?"

Rìona gave him a gentle smile. "Perhaps he cared for you more than you suspect. You said it was Lady Isolde's fear of the rumors that you were actually Eamon's bastard that forced him to send you away. While it doesn't excuse her petty cruelty, I believe there was more to it than that. Sending you to the monastery would have been a political decision, not a personal one. It's often done in noble families to prevent second sons and daughters from muddling the succession. Sworn to chastity, you would not have produced an heir to compete with Cailan's line, and as a mere templar vowed to the service of the Chantry, you would have no banner to which others might rally and rise against Cailan's rule. It would not surprise me if the decision was made by King Maric and that Eamon had found himself with little say in the matter."

"I... never thought of that," Alistair said, staring down at the amulet again. "All I could see at the time was that I was being rejected by the only family I had ever known."

"You were just a child," Rìona shrugged. "And I suspect you were deliberately kept ignorant of certain political realities."

Alistair raised his head, his expression unhappy as he met her eyes. "After what I said to you yesterday, you still thought to give this to me?"

"I am not a petty or spiteful person, Alistair." Again, she found her shoulders lifting in a shrug, and then her lips lifted in an ironic smile. "And I try to avoid being a _bitch_ when I possibly can, for it rarely wins one many allies. This amulet is as much your birthright as your royal blood, as much as this sword on my back is mine. It would have been wrong, by any accounting, to keep it from you."

"I don't understand you," he said, shaking his head. "Not even a little. Everything about you is a contradiction to what I've been told to expect from a woman who... who..."

"We have a great deal of labor ahead of us, if we're going to bring down Teyrn Loghain and stop the Blight," Rìona declared, wrapping her cloak and blanket around her. "And I don't want to be constantly at odds with you as we go about it. But I cannot be anyone other than who I am. Perhaps when you're ready to stop assessing people and situations in terms of what you've _been told_ to expect and evaluating them on their own merits, you'll find I'm not so difficult to comprehend, after all."

"I just... I can't resign myself to your methods. But I don't want to spend all my time fighting with you, either."

"Then don't," she answered simply with a serenity she didn't quite feel. It was ridiculous that his approval should matter enough to her that she would be troubled by the fact that she could never have it.

They were spared the necessity of further conversation when Leliana entered, looking absolutely wretched with the cold. Rìona offered her a cup of hot water from the pot heating in the brazier.

"There's no tea to steep in it, but it's warm," she said, shivering. Leliana accepted gratefully.

"What is it you intend to do once we reach the Circle Tower?" Morrigan inquired from where she lay in her hammock, wrapped only in a cloak. The cold didn't seem to be affecting her quite so badly, but then, she'd spent most of the day as a wolf, warm within its fur coat. Rìona envied her ability to assume animal form, if only for that fact.

Rìona shrugged. "I suppose that depends on what difficulty we encounter there," she answered. "The rumors I've heard in the inns and from Bodhan Feddic have been scarce on details, but lead me to believe the templars have closed off the tower. I suppose we must first navigate our way around the templars and make sure we'll have no trouble with them."

"And what then?" Morrigan demanded, rising. "Another pointless errand of mercy? Shall we risk our lives for those pathetic creatures who allow themselves to be corralled like mindless cattle?"

Rìona glared at the witch. "You might have been one of them, had circumstances been different."

"Am I supposed to feel some kinship toward them simply because Flemeth shielded me from your Chantry? I do not."

"Not everyone is fortunate enough to have an ages-old abomination for a mother," Rìona snapped. "As you just saw in Redcliffe, even the most powerful families in the land cannot gainsay the right of the Chantry to tear children from the arms of their mothers, when they are found to be mages. Why should you disdain them?"

"And why should you pity them?" the witch shot back.

Rìona looked away. "It's not pity," she said softly. "It's empathy."

With an indignant sniff, Morrigan left the cabin. Rìona shivered again with a chill that owed nothing to the weather.

"Rìona?" Leliana asked gently, her observant eyes seeking.

"You used that word before," Alistair noted. "Empathy."

"Of course," she shrugged. "You of all people should understand just how severely the Chantry condemns licentious behavior. We _harlots_ may not be hunted down by the templars like the mages are, but that day may yet come."

"You shouldn't speak of yourself that way," Leliana scolded, draping an arm around Rìona's shoulders and in so doing sharing her warmth and her blanket. Rìona's eyes met Alistair's, but he looked away awkwardly. Her throwing his words back at him stung him, but he would not retract them.

After a moment, she laid her head on Leliana's shoulder. Silence fell, marred only by the creak of the ship and the squeak of the oil lamp as it swung on its chain from the low beams overhead.

"I had a twin brother once," Rìona murmured as the cabin grew darker with the fall of night. Leliana started with surprise, and Alistair lifted his head to stare at her with wide eyes. "Aodhán. He died of a fever before our seventh winter."

They were silent, waiting for her to continue. At length, she did. "As is sometimes the way of twins, we were inseparable. It never occurred to us to spend a moment apart. We slept in different beds in the nursery only because Nan insisted upon it. Once she left the room, I would crawl into his bed to sleep, wrapped around one another as we had been since we were mere babes in the womb. I was larger and bolder than he, but I adored him madly and would not stir from his side.

"One fine, crisp autumn day we escaped Nan's supervision and wandered too far from the castle. We were scrambling over some rocky crags when I fell and my leg broke. Aodhán was beside himself, for he was smaller than me and could not help me back to the castle. I insisted he should run back and fetch help, but there were storm clouds moving in. He knew I was deathly afraid of storms and he didn't want to leave me. He wept... and then he grew very still and intent. He touched my leg and... something happened. My ears popped and a strange, warm feeling suffused my leg. Then suddenly it didn't hurt nearly as badly anymore and I could stand and walk upon it, though not without a severe limp and horrid aching."

"Perhaps you didn't break it after all," Alistair said, though he didn't sound convinced.

"I _heard_ the bone snap, like a piece of wood," Rìona insisted. "I'll never forget that sound. It was broken, beyond any question. But suddenly it wasn't, and Aodhán was pale and drawn, shaking like a leaf in a violent wind. When he tried to rise, he hadn't the strength to do so. And so I was the one who had to limp back to the castle for help. It didn't occur to me _not_ to tell them what had happened to cause Aodhán's inability to return with me. I was so amazed by my leg being fixed that I exclaimed quite loudly about it. I didn't know, then, why my father and mother grew so pale and why Nan and Fergus snapped at me to hush. But by then the servants and knights had already heard and it was unavoidable that word should spread.

"The storm was full upon us, already raging, by the time they located him. I was cowering in the nursery, terrified by the thunder, when Father carried him in," she continued in a hollow voice, tears sliding down her face. Her eyes were unfocused, staring at a tableau that was no longer there. "Within a day Aodhán began to cough and was abed with a fever. Nan tended him morning and night for days as his cough worsened and his breath rattled in his chest. I curled beside him on the bed and felt the heat that positively _radiated_ from his thin, frail body. He was burning up, and yet he shivered so very hard. The nursery smelled of medicinal herbs that Nan kept steaming in a pot on the hearth, which she steeped into hot compresses that she laid upon his chest and tinctures that she poured down his throat by the spoonful. Finally, in the middle of the fifth afternoon Nan fell into an exhausted slumber. I was the only one awake with him when he died. Mother and Father were not there for his final moments, for they were in the Great Hall, arguing with the templars who had arrived to take him away from us."

Leliana sniffled and hugged her close, but Rìona shook off the embrace, the grief too old and achingly distant for such easy comfort. It was Alistair upon whom her eyes fell, bleak and angry as she rose.

"To this day, I thank the Maker that Aodhán died when he did, with me curled around him, thinking him to be the most _perfect_ thing in all of creation, rather than alone and lonely, surrounded by strangers who considered him the source of all evil. So do I question the Chantry? Every day of my life. Do I empathize with the mages? Beyond a doubt. Do I understand Arlessa Isolde's actions, no matter how misguided they might have been? Maker help me, I do." She glared at him from eyes that shone with brimming tears. "Remember that, before you try to tell me I might have no choice but to kill a mage, or that I should casually let a woman sacrifice her own life because she wishes to atone for the sin of protecting her child from the custody of the Chantry."

She did not give him a chance to respond, but turned her back and climbed into one of the hammocks, clutching her cloak and blankets close for warmth as the swaying of the ship gradually rocked her into a troubled slumber.

(A/N: I wrote the end of this chapter nearly two months before the _A Midwinter's Thaw_ AU Interlude that was posted on December 3rd. Any similarities are purely coincidental.)


	17. Chapter Seventeen: Weapons

"You like art, Sten?"

"Is there a point to this question?"

He sat outside an inn on the shores of Lake Calenhad waiting for the Warden and her company to finish their meal, so that they could take another ferry to the mage tower. Why the boat they had originally taken couldn't just have delivered them to the island tower, which sat there tall and spindly, looking ridiculously luxurious for a prison, was a mystery.

When the sten had inquired about this roundabout way of doing things, he was informed that the boat from which they had just disembarked was not allowed to approach the island which housed the tower, and that a hot meal in a warm inn would do them all good before they went to confront whatever difficulty plagued the mages. The sten had eaten his meal and quickly stepped back outside the inn. He didn't like the smell of Fereldan public houses.

From the pallor of her face, and the way she swallowed convulsively, it appeared the Warden didn't either.

With an effort, he suppressed the growl that rose instinctively up in his throat when the female Grey Warden approached and sat beside him on the rough-hewn bench, irritated at being disturbed. He wasn't entirely successful and a low rumble vibrated deep in his chest. The Warden didn't seem to hear it, but the brave hound at her side cocked his head and answered it with a nearly inaudible vibration of his own. Satisfied with the challenge and response, the sten nodded acknowledgment to the dog and raised his eyes to the Warden.

The Warden smiled. She did that a great deal, usually when something was giving her difficulty. "I'm merely curious. You spent hours in the portrait gallery of Castle Redcliffe staring at the paintings," she pressed. "It seemed a strange pastime for one bred to warfare such as yourself."

"I was meditating."

"Oh?" Her eyebrows lifted in surprise.

"Those paintings were the products of very disciplined minds. I was attempting to understand that control," the sten explained.

She looked taken aback by that declaration, but shrugged and produced something from behind her back. "In that case, perhaps this will not come amiss after all," she said carefully and offered him a flat, silk-wrapped parcel slightly larger than his own hand. "I do not know if the qunari celebrate First Day, but here in Ferelden it is traditional to give gifts at the start of the new year. I lost track of time after Ostagar, but discovered when we were in Redcliffe that tomorrow is First Day."

He unwound the length of silk from around the parcel to find a small painting he'd noticed in the gallery at Redcliffe. Astonished, he looked up at her.

"I noticed you were particularly intent upon this piece, and so I asked the arlessa if I might have it," the Warden explained. The sten looked back at the painting for a moment, struggling to comprehend the gesture. He traced the thirty-two identical bowls it displayed as though the meaning might be hidden within them.

"Impressive. But... I do not understand."

"Understand what?"

"The purpose of this gesture, this tradition."

"There is no purpose to it," she shrugged. "We do it simply to give one another joy and to celebrate the dawning of a new year."

The sten gave another low growl, unsatisfied with the answer. He could have told her that joy did not come in silk-wrapped bundles, but in fulfilling one's purpose, but he did not think she would understand. And with her tendency to find amusement in many of his opinions, doubtless she would merely laugh—again—should he ask if celebrating a new year was premature, considering they had no way of knowing what that year would hold.

And he really admired the even brushstrokes of the painting and did not wish to reject the offering.

"What is expected of me, as my role in this tradition?"

"Nothing much," she said, her lips twitching in a smile. He had amused her again. _Vashedan._ "Though generally the words 'thank you' are involved."

"Is reciprocation expected?"

"Not by those who do not keep the tradition themselves," she answered with a shake of her head. She was still smiling. He did not understand why she consistently found him so amusing, in much the same way that he didn't understand why she so frequently smelled of other people.

When he'd first met her in Lothering, she had smelled strongly of the men who had run past his cage unclothed in the cold, cursing and reeking of fermented wheat. The morning they had gone to Castle Redcliffe to deal with the child-mage, she had smelled of the man called Bann Teagan. Then she had sent him and the Redcliffe knights from the Great Hall while she and the mages remained behind to deal with the demon possessing the child. She had been carried out unconscious, wrapped in a cloak that was not her own and smelling of blood and the mage they traveled with, the unleashed one whose tongue should have been cut out long ago for reasons having nothing to do with the fact that she was a mage.

Fereldans were a bizarre people, he thought. They had no Tamassran to evaluate them and assign them to their proper roles within society. As a result, they seemed determined to put themselves in the roles they were least suited to, most especially the Warden. She showed a strong aptitude for organizational tasks; had she been qunari she would likely have been one of the Tamassran herself. What she did not show a strong aptitude for was fighting, and yet that was her role. She was capable enough with her bow. Her aim was actually quite excellent. But she was clearly deficient with her daggers and that posed a liability in close-quarters combat.

The sten had tried to explain to her, and also to the red-headed female who really ought to have been an artisan of some kind, if not a priest, that they were not in their proper roles. They both seemed to be insulted by that and inferred that he was saying they were inferior because fighting was not their proper role as women. Eventually he had given up. He was a sten of the Beresaad, not a Tamassran; it was not for him to instruct them on their roles, however wrongly they may be assigned.

Equally bizarre was the Warden's preoccupation with mating. Though he did not often encounter the scent of sex, it was familiar enough that he could smell it upon her when she carried the scent of other people. With no Tamassran to assign her a mate with whom to breed, was she attempting to find her own mate? If so, however, why waste her efforts on the female mage?

And why would she wish to mate while trying to stop the Blight? It made no sense.

"If you wish to return the gesture, perhaps your gift to me might be to explain to me... why _this_ painting?" she was saying, pulled the sten out of his musings. "There were other, much finer paintings in the gallery, and yet you seemed fascinated by this very plain one."

The sten sighed aloud at her ignorance. "It is not plain. It is precise."

"In what regard?"

"It is a small painting, and yet this one image, this bowl—"

"Tureen, actually," she corrected.

"—This _dish_ is recreated to the smallest detail with utter accuracy thirty-two times. The control and skill the artisan must have had, to wield her brush with such minute care, is considerable."

"Why 'her?'"

"Women are priests, artisans—"

"—Shopkeepers and farmers. Yes, so you've said before," the Grey Warden interrupted, nodding impatiently. "So a qunari man cannot be an artist?"

"Of course not. Why would he wish to be?" the sten asked.

"Perhaps he has an interest in it or an aptitude for it."

"Whatever his interest or aptitude, there will always been other tasks for which he has a greater aptitude, because he is a man, just as there will always be women with a greater aptitude for art than his own," the sten insisted. "Why would the Tamassran assign him to a role that can be better fulfilled by another when his own abilities will better fulfill a different role? It's inefficient."

"Oh, Maker's blood," the Grey Warden groaned. "That makes no sense."

"You asked."

"So I did, though I'm little wiser for it."

"Then why ask?"

"Because I don't know what to make of you," the Grey Warden answered frankly. "I don't know how to relate to you. I'm sure I don't need to tell you that I'm not a military leader by nature. I'm far better suited to leading men to bed than to battle. I fight because I must, not because it comes naturally to me or because I was particularly trained to it beyond the rudimentary necessities. Those who follow me do so for their own reasons, not because of any great skill as a general on my part.

"But then there's you. I took an enormous risk freeing you from that cage in Lothering rather than leaving you to die for your crimes. You admit you murdered that farm family, but you've still offered no explanation why. And you've done nothing but complain about the decisions I've made since then. You did not approve of my choice to help Redcliffe, despite its necessity, and now you're grumbling about the mages and this talk of seeking the Urn of Sacred Ashes. If I thought I could, I'd try to seduce you and engage your affections, thereby winning your willing cooperation. But clearly that's not an option, which leaves me at a bit of a loss. To put it bluntly, you seem to pose a danger of mutiny and I need to know if I can trust you to follow my command, or if perhaps it's better that we part company now."

The sten looked at the painting in his hand and its precision, the skill and control of the artisan who had painted it, mocked him. Perhaps it would be better to leave the Grey Warden's company, but... where would he go?

"So... will you tell me why you were in that cage?" she insisted. "Or shall I just ask you to leave?"

"I caged myself," the sten finally answered. "A weak mind is a deadly foe, as you are no doubt aware."

She blinked several times rapidly. "I'm... not sure what to make of that. Were I the sort to read an insult into everything, I could easily take offense. Perhaps you ought to clarify. What do you mean by 'a weak mind?'"

Grinding his teeth at the shame and necessity, he told her. He told her of coming to Ferelden in the company of his brethren of the Beresaad seeking answers about the Blight. He told her of being overrun by a band of darkspawn on the shores of Lake Calenhad and of seeing his brethren fall, one by one before he himself was knocked unconscious. He told her of waking under the care of a farm family who were nursing him back to health to find his sword was missing, and how he panicked and slew them with his bare hands.

"You slew them over a sword?" she asked, aghast.

"My sword is Asala, my soul. It is the very essence of who I am," he said, feeling an echo of that same mindless panic that had made him slaughter the farmers who'd had the misfortune to rescue him. "It was made for my hand alone, and has been with me since the day the Tamassrans set me into the Beresaad. I was to die wielding it for my people."

The Grey Warden stared at him, and he knew she did not comprehend, not fully. But still she nodded, and touched the hilt of the sword that rode over her shoulder, the blade she never drew, like a talisman.

"I can't pretend to truly understand what went through your mind that day," she finally mused. "Even this blade, precious though it is to me, would never drive me to such a state. But I understand at least some of what you felt that day, I think. I too have lost nearly everything I once was."

Sten nodded. "Then you comprehend me better than you think. You wonder why I follow you, inept though you are at command. That is why. By combating the Blight, I may find my atonement for the murder of that family. And I have nowhere else to be. Even if I managed the journey and returned to Seheron without Asala, I would be known as a soulless deserter and slain on sight."

"I'm sorry, Sten," she said, laying a hand on his arm. He stared at it much as he would a curious insect that had lighted on him. She frequently touched people, and it confused him as much as her seemingly pointless mating habits. She seemed to think it demonstrated friendship or affection, which was absurd. One showed affection by fulfilling the duty expected of one by one's brethren, by taking one's place in the order. "I know all too well how difficult it is to have no home to which you may return."

Answering that was futile. His soul was lost, and with it everything he was. Dwelling on it would accomplish nothing.

"Where precisely along Lake Calenhad were you beset by darkspawn?" she asked after a long, silent moment.

"Further south of here, closer to Lothering, which was why I was taken there when I turned myself in," he answered. She rose and picked up her pack, setting it upon her shoulders and he did likewise.

"Hmm." She gave him a thoughtful look. "It had been my intention to take the northern road to Denerim. Loghain's troops are no doubt keeping a closer eye on the southern road, thinking we'll approach from Ostagar or Redcliffe. But perhaps it won't hurt to spend a day or two searching the area where you engaged the darkspawn and see if we can find some hint of where your sword may have been lost."

"You would do that?"

She shrugged. "I don't see why we shouldn't. I sincerely doubt a short delay will make all that much difference." With that, she gave him a smile he'd seen her turn upon other men, usually before she wound up smelling like them. "Since fucking you is out of the question, I'll have to find another way to win your goodwill."

"I do not know this word, 'fucking.'"

The Grey Warden rolled her eyes. "Oh, Andraste's tits!" she muttered. "_Fuck._ To copulate, to fornicate, to couple."

Comprehension dawned. "You are speaking of mating."

"Exactly."

"You do this often, mating," he observed. "Was that to be your assigned role, then, before you became a Grey Warden?"

"Er. My 'assigned role?'" Her brow furrowed for a moment. "In a manner of speaking, I guess."

"Interesting. The Tamassrans assign breeding pairs from all elements within our society. We do not have one group whose sole function is breeding."

The Grey Warden stared at him. "What of pleasure?"

"Mating is to produce children for the Tamassrans to teach. What does pleasure have to do with it?"

Again, that smile. Like a predator on the hunt. "Pleasure can be a weapon, keener than any sword. It can make a determined man forget his goals. It can cajole a reluctant man into a more agreeable frame of mind. It can convince an armed man to lay down his weapons and release his caution for a while."

The sten snorted. "Why would your people seek this, then?"

"Because pleasure can also be addictive. You saw the state I was in when I released you from your cage in Lothering, Sten. I'm not fighter enough to defeat six armed men by myself. How do you think I prevailed?"

He stared at her thoughtfully. "I did wonder at the time. From your condition, I had assumed a mighty battle had taken place. But now that I know what sort of fighter you are, clearly that would have been impossible."

"Precisely," she nodded. "I may not be any sort of proper warrior in your book, Sten, but I am not without weapons."

"So I see." It hadn't occurred to him, until that moment, to consider the victory she had won that day. Perhaps there was something to the stories of Grey Wardens being warriors without equal after all. "Perhaps you are not as callow as I thought. I suppose, then, you should be commended on your diligence in fulfilling your role amongst your people."

"Qunari honestly don't mate for pleasure?" she asked, her brow knotting in confusion.

"The act is pleasant, I am told, but we mate when we are instructed to do so by the Tamassrans, with a chosen partner whose inherent abilities they wish to enhance in the next generation. It seems we are better off for this. Obviously the pursuit of such pleasure makes your own people weak."

"But... what of companionship? Or fun? Affection? Love, even?"

"We experience those things among our brethren, those in our group who fulfill the same role as we do. We express them by fulfilling our roles and aiding one another to make the whole stronger. I do not see what those things have to do with mating."

She opened her mouth as though to answer, then snapped it shut, then opened it again, then snapped it shut again. It was a wonder she did not sever her tongue.

"Well... I..." She shook her head sharply, decisively. "Never mind. Thank you, Sten, for your compliment. I'm pleased to have your approval. Now," she said briskly, offering him a strange, too-eager smile. "Let's see about the mages, shall we?"

Rising, the sten shouldered his pack and followed her to the ferry dock to await their companions.


	18. Chapter Eighteen: Corruption

In her worst nightmares, Rìona could not have imagined the situation she would find at the tower of the Circle of Magi. When the rumors reported that the tower had been closed off, she assumed the templars were restricting who went in or out. It hadn't occurred to her that the tower was literally equipped with thick, massive steel doors which could be bolted from the outside, trapping everyone inside the tower.

That alone would not have been so bad. But that action had been precipitated by the fact that the tower had been overrun by abominations, mages possessed by demons as Connor Guerrin had been. In sealing off the tower, Greagoir, Knight-Commander of the tower's templars, had locked inside an untold number of innocent mages—and, he made certain to point out, a number of his own templars as well—leaving them at the non-existent mercy of the abominations.

To make matters worse, Greagoir informed her that he'd sent to Denerim for something called the Right of Annulment.

"What is the Right of Annulment?" Rìona asked with trepidation.

"In the event of this sort of emergency, the Grand Cleric drafts a writ that gives the tower's templars the right to neutralize the Circle... completely," the Knight-Commander explained.

She darted a glance at Alistair to see his grim nod. "Neutralize? You mean murder."

Greagoir looked affronted. "We cannot take the chance that any of those creatures will get loose. A single abomination could kill hundreds of people if it were to escape, and there were many of them within the tower."

"But there are innocents in there as well!" Rìona protested, even as she recalled the dozens of deaths that had resulted from one possessed boy. "Surely not every mage was possessed. Do _those_ innocent lives matter less than the ones which would be lost if an abomination were to escape?"

"It is not a course of action I undertake lightly," Greagoir's expression, though resolute, was aggrieved. "But it is necessary. If we could somehow get the innocents from the tower without releasing the abominations, I would do so. But I haven't enough men for such a task, at least not if I am to keep enough outside the doors to guard against any abominations getting loose. They have been locked in there for days now. We must assume that the innocents are already dead and all that remains are demons and abominations."

"How long until the writ arrives?" Rìona asked desperately.

"My rider has surely reached Denerim by now," Greagoir answered. "The Grand Cleric must approve the petition, in writing, which she will certainly do with little hesitation. Once the order is drafted, a large force of templars will ride out from Denerim, stopping at each chantry they pass along the way to collect more templars. By the time they reach us, they will be an army, sufficient to deal with whatever evil lingers within the tower. It will likely be several days, perhaps a week or more, until they arrive, though."

Rìona closed her eyes in relief. "Then there is yet time," she breathed. "Very well. I will take my company into the tower and search for survivors."

"I will not refuse you permission to do so, if you are truly set upon it," Greagoir replied. "Only know that once you pass through those doors, you will not be allowed to come back out. Not unless you bring with you the First Enchanter himself to assure me that the Circle has been made safe again."

"And if the First Enchanter is dead?" Rìona asked bleakly.

"If Irving has fallen, then the Circle is lost, and we will carry out the Right of Annulment accordingly," he declared firmly.

"Very well. I will do what I must, then," Rìona said, turning her back upon him and ignoring his invocation of Andraste's blessing upon her.

"Are you sure about this?" Alistair asked softly, raising his hands defensively when she turned a fierce glare upon him. "Please. I'm not criticizing. After what you've told me— I understand _why_ you're doing this and I don't blame you. Maker help me, I think perhaps I even agree with you. Even without more personal considerations, it makes good strategic sense. If the Circle were... _neutralized_," —it made her think better of him that he spoke the euphemism with a bitter twist, as though it left a foul taste in his mouth— "the templars would be free to fight for us against the Blight. But templars are a primarily defensive force. Against the archdemon, they'd be so much grist for the mill. We're going to need to be able to do massive damage from a distance, and that seems like an ideal job for mages. That's why Duncan encouraged the king to summon aid from the Circle to Ostagar."

"Then what is your concern?" Rìona asked, calmer now she knew he was not going to encourage her to write off the mages still trapped within the tower. They could not all be dead, down to every last child apprentice. They simply couldn't be. It was too horrific to contemplate.

"We're the only two Grey Wardens in Ferelden, the only ones who can battle the Blight. Do we really have the right to risk our lives on this?" He lifted his remarkable hazel-gold eyes to hers, and she could see how the question troubled him. He was not being self-serving or craven, nor was he writing off the lives of the mages. It was a valid point. "If we both fall, then what? Who will stand against Loghain and end the Blight?"

"You're right," she said, nodding after a moment. "Which is why I think you should stay out here. You keep Sten and I'll take Leliana and Morrigan and Conall with me. If I don't make it out... uniting Ferelden against the Blight will fall to you."

She wasn't prepared for the vehemence of his response. "Have you gone utterly daft?" Alistair demanded shortly. "I hope it hasn't escaped your notice that I happen to be a templar? Who better to go into a tower full of possessed mages? Certainly I'm better suited for that than claiming the rest of these treaty rights and playing at political gambits with Loghain!"

"You're absolutely right," Rìona acknowledged, hanging her head. "But be that as it may... Maker, Alistair! Whatever strategic justification we may come up with here, we both know my motivations in this are purely personal. I won't let the mages die if I can save them. I simply _can't_. I _have_ to go in there; I have no other choice. But it would be wrong of me to risk Ferelden's only other Grey Warden on what amounts to my own personal crusade."

"I'm not staying out here; that's all there is to it. You need a templar in there, and I don't see any of _these_ fellows jumping up to volunteer. So," He offered her a shrug and a crooked smile. "I guess we both just have to make sure to come out alive."

With that, he walked away to rejoin their companions, and she wondered at his unwillingness to be left behind. It brought to mind his grief over the loss of Duncan and the other Grey Wardens, and the plaguing certainty—which even Alistair admitted was unreasonable—that had he been with them, he might somehow have prevented their deaths.

Was he trying to make up for that imaginary failure, she wondered, or was he simply so afraid of being left to his own devices?

And could she really blame him? She, who had lost everyone she cared about as well?

Sighing, she unslung her bow from her shoulder and turned to find herself face-to-face with Morrigan.

"Might I have a word with you?"

Nodding, Rìona crouched and began sorting through her packs. There was no sense taking their tents or bedrolls into the tower with them, but without knowing how long they would be in there and with no ability to hunt, food rations would be important. Perhaps she could send someone back across the lake to the Spoiled Princess tavern at the docks to buy more provisions before they went inside.

"Certainly," she said distractedly, her mind on food stores and bandages. "What can I do for you, Morrigan?"

"We may have here an opportunity of which I think we should take advantage," the witch said.

"Indeed? I thought it was a waste of your time and an unnecessary risk to help the mages?" Rìona needled, then chastised herself. Something about Morrigan's own lack of tact and unabashed self-interest brought out in Rìona a catty, bitchy tendency she didn't much like in herself. "I'm sorry, that was uncalled for. You were saying?"

Morrigan seemed taken aback by the apology. It took her a moment of visible effort to quash whatever awkward dismissal or scathing retort had leapt reflexively to her caustic tongue. Finally she settled upon ignoring the overture entirely and continued on with what she had been intending to say.

There was a grimoire, she informed Rìona, that had once belonged to Flemeth. It had been seized by the templars during one of their many attempts to hunt Flemeth in the Korcari Wilds. Morrigan suspected it had likely been brought to this very tower to be studied, and locked away when it became clear that no one could decipher the ancient languages and codes Flemeth would have used to write in it.

It was that grimoire that Morrigan proposed to attempt to find, should the chance present itself.

"What is it you hope to find, if it should be located?" Rìona asked.

"Secrets," the witch answered with a predatory gleam in her eye. "Mother has many, and an opportunity to learn more than she wishes me to know is too good to be missed."

"Very well." Rìona agreed. "If we have the chance, it's certainly worth a look. But saving whatever mages are still alive in that tower is my first priority."

Morrigan appeared ready to argue, then nodded her assent. Rìona stared after her a moment, then returned to sorting through her packs. 

* * *

The air inside the tower was heavy with the stench of death. The iron tang of blood, the sweetly-rotten essence of putrefying flesh, the sharp ammonia odor of urine, and the rank sewer smell of bowels released in the instant of death.

Everyone in the vicinity of the massive iron portals began to gag when they were opened to admit Rìona and her party. Rìona, whose tolerance for strong odors had taken a marked decline in recent weeks, promptly stripped off her helm and was ill in a corner near the doors. The only thing which saved her from utter mortification was that several of the templars who were standing ready in case abominations began to pour out once the doors were open did likewise.

When she straightened, Alistair wordlessly handed her a waterskin, looking green around the gills himself. Rinsing the foul taste from her mouth and spitting, she nodded grimly, replaced her helm, and led the way into the tower.

Behind them, the heavy doors slammed shut with an echo that made them flinch. If the abominations hadn't been aware that they were coming, they certainly were now.

There were corpses on the floor. Old, bearded men with staves in their hands, women in the trademark robes of the Circle, one or two creatures that Rìona thought must actually be demons, and then there was a child.

"Maker preserve us!" Leliana gasped, and Rìona turned away to disgorge what little remained in her stomach. The lad must have been thirteen or fourteen years old, with ginger hair and blue-gray eyes staring sightlessly at the vaulted ceiling of the apprentice dormitories. But to Rìona's mind, he was much younger, with the softly curling chestnut locks he shared with his twin sister and his mother's bright green eyes.

She pulled a blanket from one of the bunks lining the dormitory and covered him, then made herself look away and continue onward.

There was no living soul in the apprentice dormitories, and Rìona felt a sick sense of hopelessness and despair settling upon her. But the number of bodies, particularly children and young men and women, did not seem nearly equal to the number of seemingly occupied bunks and footlockers they found. Either the apprentices had died in some other part of the tower, or there was a chance they were still alive.

They found the answer beyond the dormitories, in a large atrium leading to the libraries. There, several adult mages had shepherded the children into a single defensible area and erected a magical barrier shutting the atrium and dormitories off from the rest of the tower. But it was when the leader of this group of mages turned to face Rìona that she got her greatest shock, for she had met the elderly woman before.

"Wynne?" she gasped, astonished to see another survivor from Ostagar.

"It's you!" the mage said, clearly startled. But then she brandished her staff at them, scowling. "Stay back. Grey Warden or no, I will strike you down."

It took Rìona a moment of confusion to realize that the mage feared she had come to aid the templars in fulfilling the Right of Annulment.

"You needn't fear," she hurried to assure the mages. "I'm not here on behalf of the templars. I've come seeking survivors, preferably _before_ the writ arrives from Denerim."

"Then Greagoir has sent for it," Wynne said, lowering her staff and sagging in weary dismay. "It is as I feared."

"Do you know if the First Enchanter lives?" Rìona pressed. "Greagoir said he will spare the tower if it can be made secure, but he will only accept the First Enchanter's word that it is safe."

"I haven't seen Irving in days," the silver-haired woman answered. "But if he lives we must find him."

And so Rìona unexpectedly found herself with another companion. Wynne would not permit them to leave her behind; taking her along was the price she demanded for lowering the barrier to allow them into the rest of the tower. The mages and children were hungry and thirsty; it had been days since they'd had access to the tower's food stores. Though concerned with the state of their own supplies, Rìona opened her packs and shared her food and water amongst them, refusing to let herself look too long at the frightened and traumatized children. While they ate, Wynne informed her what had happened at the tower.

A revolt, she called it, led by a mage named Uldred. He, too, was a survivor of Ostagar. Rìona remembered him, a weaselly-looking man with a grating, nasal voice and a ridiculously obsequious manner. Wynne had stayed behind to aid the few survivors who had managed to make it off the battlefield, but Uldred hied himself back to the tower in order to spread the word that Loghain was in charge and, if the mages supported him, he would help them to be free of the Chantry.

Hearing the tale, Rìona once again felt rage flaring white-hot in her breast. Here was more proof Loghain's treachery had been laid in place well in advance. She remembered the king's war council, before that battle. Loghain had first proposed his own men stay in the Tower of Ishal to light the beacon, and when the king had overruled him, Uldred had stepped forth and offered to do it, only to be ridiculed by the Revered Mother, who refused to entrust any lives to his spells and insisted he save them for the darkspawn.

Loghain never intended the beacon to be lit, and Uldred knew it. He'd have used its absence as an excuse to withhold his troops from the battle and allow the king to fall. How it must have infuriated Loghain when the king sent the Grey Wardens to light the thing. With their success, he lost his rationale for failing to join the battle.

When she thought of the guilt and uncertainty she'd suffered, imagining Loghain's betrayal to be her own fault, Rìona felt her hatred burn hotter still. But still, to offer to free the mages from the Chantry...

… that was a goal she could support. In opposing him, she also opposed the best chance the mages had seen for their own autonomy since the founding of the Chantry.

Her heart was heavy with uncertainty as Wynne dropped her barrier and they passed through still more dormitories. Here there were... creatures. Monstrous creatures, some of flame and others of oddly molded, leathery flesh.

_Demons_, she thought grimly, loosing the arrow which felled one. They encountered still more in the library and along the way to the second floor. It was her first look at demons; they didn't seem nearly as difficult as she had imagined them to be. It wasn't until they had slain the final such creature at the bottom of the staircase leading to the second floor that she learned her assumptions had been wrong.

Wynne was looking down at the corpses with a sorrowful expression; those few which had not exploded following their deaths.

"Who were they, I wonder?" she heard the old mage murmur.

"What do you mean? These are demons, are they not?" Rìona asked, puzzled.

"Demons? No. Demons are much more difficult to destroy than these have been." Wynne gave her a strange look. "I thought you said you encountered abominations before."

"Abominations?" she asked, looking at the deformed creature at her feet. Horror ran icy claws of dread down her spine. "These were mages?"

"Were, yes," Wynne answered, frowning. "When the demon takes over, they become nothing but a... mindless drive to destroy."

"But the abominations I've met haven't been like this!" Rìona protested, feeling sick again. They had been killing mages all along, at least a dozen by now. "They were still human in form, and had some semblance of reason. The boy even had moments when he was free of the demon's control."

The mage nodded. "Sometimes the possession is not complete. Not all demons want to leave the Fade entirely. A particularly powerful demon can remain in the Fade and control the mage from there, merging only part of itself with the mage. If the mage is quite powerful as well, part of her essence can even linger with the demon in the Fade, so that killing the abomination here on the mortal plane merely weakens it, rather than destroying it entirely."

"Why are we killing these... _mages?_" Rìona demanded. "Surely we can release them, as we did with Connor in Redcliffe. He's fine now; he doesn't even remember what he did while he was possessed."

"I have no knowledge of what you might have done with this other abomination, or why it worked," Wynne answered, shaking her head and grimacing. "But here we have no choice. If we do not destroy these, they will destroy us."

When they reached the storeroom on the second floor, more disturbing news awaited them. The Tranquil storekeeper Owain informed them that another mage, Niall, arrived days ago to collect an artifact known as the Litany of Adralla.

"Then it is as I feared," Wynne sighed. "Blood magic is at work here."

"First Jowan and now Uldred," Alistair muttered. "Why is Loghain recruiting blood mages?"

"_That_ is a very valid question," Rìona replied, looking at him. He blinked and seemed startled by the idea that he had raised a good point. "Perhaps he feels mages already in rebellion against the Chantry's yoke will be more willing to side with a madman who killed his king? Wynne, what is this Litany? What has it to do with blood magic?"

"Blood mages with sufficient power can control the minds of others," Wynne explained. "Reciting the Litany shields one from mind domination."

"Are you sure?" Rìona asked in confusion. "We encountered a blood mage in Redcliffe and he didn't seem like a particularly corrupt person, certainly not inclined to do any such thing. I was beginning to think claims of maleficarum controlling the minds of others were simply hysterical rumors."

"They are quite true," Wynne said firmly. "Like any weapon, whether blood magic is used or not for evil purpose is at the discretion of the wielder. Perhaps this mage you encountered has not yet been corrupted by the power he wields. But blood magic is learnt from demons, or from other blood mages who themselves were taught by demons. The mage who opens himself up enough to a demon to learn such magic is at great risk of becoming an abomination. And once you learn to draw power by sacrificing the well-being of others, it becomes easier and easier to disregard their well-being entirely in favor of your own power. Blood magic is, by its very nature, corrupting."

"What this preachy schoolmarm would call corruption, I would simply deem survival," Morrigan interjected.

"I see," Rìona dropped her eyes unhappily. She thought of Jowan, who seemed such a decent soul and much at the mercy of fate and circumstance. It was difficult to imagine him as being corrupt, but then, he hadn't flinched when he'd proposed performing a human sacrifice, had he? Perhaps it was true that the very fact of being in possession of a corrupt power corrupted its wielder.

They continued onward, and with each abomination and blood mage they slew, Rìona felt her rage and helpless despair mount. There were few other survivors to rescue; one strange mage hiding in a wardrobe, and a blood mage they defeated who begged for mercy. They only wanted to free themselves from the Chantry, she had pleaded. They never intended what came next, after Uldred went mad.

Rìona could not bring herself to slay the woman and so she made the mage agree to fight for her against the Blight. She could feel Wynne's questioning eyes upon her as she helped the blood mage to her feet and sent her limping back to the atrium to wait with the other survivors.

"I'll not slay anyone who wishes to redeem herself," she declared, looking at the older mage evenly. After a moment, Wynne nodded in agreement and they continued onward.

In many ways, the templars were worse. There were quite a few who had survived, but they were under the control of demons as well, not as abominations, but as slaves. They were trapped in fantasies of their deepest, most secret desires until they no longer knew what was real. At the command of their demon captors, they attacked without volition or will of their own.

Not surprisingly, a great many desires upon which the demons played revolved around sex. Templars craved the things their vows forbade them; homes, families, wives, children, passion, love. Rìona had tears in her eyes as the last such templar fell with one of her arrows protruding from his throat. For a while, she had nearly lost sight of the injustice that had made this all possible. It was the Chantry's imprisonment of the mages that had made them turn to blood magic, seeking whatever means to free themselves, and it was the Chantry's control over the templars, forcing them to eschew all their most basic human needs and desires, that gave the demons a weakness to prey upon and enslave them.

And it was Loghain, Blight claim him, who had preyed upon that fermenting chaos for his own ends.

She looked down at the templar at their feet, her features tight with anger, and cursed.

"We're doing this all wrong!" she declared angrily, looking over at Alistair. "What good is saving the tower going to do us if we're killing the very mages whose help we're supposed to be recruiting?"

He grimaced and shook his head helplessly. "They're not mages, not anymore. They're abominations. We have no choice."

"That's what everyone said about Connor, as well," Rìona muttered, storming from the room.

It was a moment until the rest of the party joined her. She laid her hand upon the knob to the door of the next room and as she turned it, looked over her shoulder. "Morrigan, would it be possible to... to..."

Her words trailed off as a sudden wave of weariness struck her. Rìona swayed on her feet, yawning, suddenly unbearably tired.

Shaking her head to clear it, she forced herself to turn the knob and entered a chamber to see a tall abomination crouching over an unconscious mage. Its hand hovered over the mage's head and Rìona could feel, in some indescribable way, the magic flowing between the two forms.

Stepping up beside her, Alistair drew himself up and tensed, and she knew he was preparing to smite the abomination and interrupt whatever spell was underway, but suddenly he slumped and yawned, the tension draining from him.

"Look what we have here," the abomination drawled in a deep, clotted voice that pulsated with waves of languor. "Visitors."

"I demand..." Rìona shook her head again, feeling so unutterably tired she wasn't sure her knees would continue to support her. "I demand you stop... whatever you're doing... to that man."

Behind her, she heard a loud groaning that she realized was Sten beginning to snore, and through the fog of weariness a thread of terror gleamed bright.

"Must... resist..." Wynne gasped, falling to her knees.

"He's just resting," the abomination said, and his horrific, monster's voice was somehow calming, relaxing. Rìona felt herself sinking into it. "Wouldn't you like to do the same? Lay down all your burdens? Let the world go on without you?"

"Attack," she sighed, dropping her bow. "Alistair..."

There was a hissing clink of metal as Alistair's chainmail-clad form fell to the marbled floor. Darkness closed in on her and Rìona knew nothing more.


	19. Chapter Nineteen: Bargains

The bedchamber was unfamiliar, and she couldn't quite remember how she had gotten there. It was dark and shadowed, strangely blurred and indistinct, lit only by a couple of candles and the fire burning on the hearth, but Rìona got the impression of clutter and dust. The wooden furniture did not gleam at a high polish as the furniture at Highever did. There was a musty, mildewy odor in the chamber that rankled the senses, as though the windows had not been opened and the bedding aired out for some time.

Whoever kept this chamber did not manage their servants well.

The silken dressing gown which draped about her felt strange against her skin. Where was her armor, she wondered, and then shook her head in confusion. Why should she feel she ought to be wearing her leather armor?

"Are you all right, darling?" a soft, beloved voice asked in subdued tones from over her shoulder.

Rìona whirled, her eyes wide with amazement. "Mother!" she cried, flinging herself into Teyrna Eleanor's arms. "Oh, Maker, Mother!"

Why did it feel she hadn't seen her mother in so very long? Why this aching longing to be held by her, when she was right there?

The teyrna sniffled, embracing Rìona. "There, there, my darling girl," she crooned, stroking Rìona's hair. "There's nothing to fear. It will be all right. This is for the best, darling, truly."

"I don't understand," Rìona said in confusion, pulling back from her mother's embrace. "I don't remember..."

"I can't linger for long," the teyrna said, pushing Rìona's hair back from her face. Her face closed off, grew distant, and she shuddered as though in revulsion. "Your bridegroom will be here shortly."

"My bridegroom?" Rìona blinked. "The king?"

Eleanor looked startled at the question. "It was good of the king to make the trip to attend your wedding, don't you think?" she asked in a falsely chatty tone as she turned away and busied herself straightening combs and hairbrushes and bottles of fragrance on the vanity. "Especially with the queen now expecting. Silly woman was trying to conceal it, but her face was decidedly puffy. I expect they'll be announcing the news to the kingdom soon."

Rìona blinked again, shaking her head. Why didn't her mother's words make sense? Surely it wasn't the queen having the king's child.

But... who was?

"The queen is barren," she argued feebly, grasping for understanding. Why did this feel all wrong?

"Nonsense," Teyrna Eleanor chided. "They've been married three years, it's true, but sometimes these things take time."

"Five years," Rìona said automatically, then snapped her mouth shut. Where had that come from?

"I beg your pardon?"

"I... I thought they had been married five years, King Cailan and Queen Anora," she stammered again, frowning.

The teyrna laughed again. "Don't be silly. You had just had your twelfth Name Day when they married, don't you remember? You were still too young to attend the wedding. And here you are, almost sixteen, now married yourself."

There was, again, a false note of lightness in her mother's tone. Rìona covered her eyes with a hand, unable to shake the sense of utter _wrongness_ about everything her mother was saying.

"Mother? I don't understand. Something's not right, I'm sure of it."

"I know, darling," Eleanor said mournfully. "But there's nothing to be done about it. Come, I'll brush your hair, like I used to when you were young. It will settle your nerves before... _he_... gets here."

Obediently she sat and her mother took up a hairbrush and began stroking Rìona's chestnut locks where they hung loose around her shoulders. The face in the polished silver mirror above the vanity was her own, but it seemed too young, too round and soft.

This wasn't right. None of this was right.

"I'm frightened, Mother."

"Shh, my dear girl," the teyrna murmured soothingly, her breath hitching on a stifled sob. "It will be all right. I've told you what to expect and what will be expected of you. Maybe now that he's received everything he demanded of us, he'll be kind to you. If not... your father and I will do what we can, but we have few options. He can ruin us, if we don't accede to his wishes. I'm sorry, darling, so very sorry it falls to you to bear the burden of my disgrace."

Her mother embraced her from behind, weeping softly. For Rìona, it simply felt lovely to be held and to inhale her mother's familiar fragrance once more. She closed her eyes and leaned into her mother's arms and let herself be held, even while her thoughts tumbled wildly.

"Here," Eleanor said, straightening and wiping her cheeks. "Have some wine; perhaps it will help make everything more bearable. Drink quickly. I hear them coming down the hall."

She drank the wine. It was raspy and of a poor vintage, but it was warm and spiced, soothing her. She rose and faced the door as it swung open to admit a boisterous party. She recognized some few of them; Arl Urien Kendells and his leering son, Vaughan. Bann Loren. Bann Ceorlic. Thomas Howe. They and a few others she could not name jostled through the door, and of the lot, only her father and Fergus and one other were not laughing and making vulgar jokes. Two warhounds nudged past the throng and settled onto the floor near the hearth.

It was the other unlaughing man who stepped forth, wrapped in a heavy velvet dressing gown of his own. Sickening horror congealed within Rìona as she beheld him, making the wine she had drunk burn like acid within her stomach. Her throat convulsed and she swallowed hard as she cast a panicked gaze back at her mother, whose face was tense and shuttered.

"Gentlemen, behold my lovely bride!" Arl Rendon Howe announced, not without a compelling dramatic flourish. Repulsive as he might be, he was possessed of a solid, cultured voice and a sense of ceremony.

Seeing no reassurance in her mother's eyes, Rìona looked to her father. He frowned and turned his gaze from her, looking away. Fergus held in his hand a goblet and looked already to be well in his cups. He was no more help than her mother or father had been. Howe lifted a hand in an imperious gesture and Teyrna Eleanor stepped forward, untying the sash that bound the dressing gown at Rìona's waist. With shaking hands, the teyrna guided it off her shoulders and carried it away, leaving Rìona standing naked and alone before Howe and the other men.

A bedding? Rìona thought wildly. It was not a tradition anyone fashionable observed these days; why was Howe insisting upon it?

Her father and Fergus still refused to look at her, but the eyes of many of the others were greedy and avid as they stared. Howe, however, did not seem particularly lustful. He was smiling, but it was an expression of cruel pleasure. He was enjoying making a display of her, even more so because she was humiliated by it, a hot flush rising over her skin.

Her mother's hand touched her arm, and on leaden feet Rìona allowed herself to be guided to the bed, where heavy satin coverlets were turned back. Was that supposed to make the musty bedding more inviting, she wondered with an edge of hysteria creeping into her thoughts. Her heart thundered, and she would have fled from the chamber in a blind panic but for her well-entrenched sense of duty. It was for her parents, not her, to decide with whom she would ally the family through marriage. Where had she ever come by the mad notion it should be otherwise?

But by Andraste's own mercy, she had no idea how this had happened. Her parents were good, kind, indulgent even. Why would they marry her to this man, whom they... loathed? Didn't they? Why did she hate him so? Hadn't Arl Howe always been a friend to her father?

Confused, she crawled between the coarse linen sheets and felt a surge of gratitude when her mother pulled the coverlets over her bare body, concealing her from the eyes of the men. Though that did little to still the rampantly ribald humor with which they nudged each other. Howe mouthed something inane about allowing an old man with a young bride some dignity and with good-natured groans, they yielded to his request and filed from the room. Her mother pressed a kiss to Rìona's brow and followed them.

The chamber door closed behind them with a sense of fatal finality.

"Well, my dear," her bridegroom sneered, pouring himself a goblet of mulled wine. "I must say your parents have kept up their end of our bargain admirably. For the daughter of a common whore, you play the blushing virgin remarkably well."

"I don't understand," Rìona said, clutching the coverlets to her breasts as he approached the bed. "Why? Why would my parents agree to this?"

"They didn't tell you?" Howe tsked, shaking his head as though in pity, but for his cruel leer. "How unkind of them not to explain to you."

"How do you know about Mother?"

"Ah, so they did explain, at least in part," Howe said, sitting on the edge of the bed. "It's been a long, drawn-out gambit, but perhaps well worth the reward. Oh, when I first learned about your mother all those years ago, I thought I would spread the news through the whole Landsmeet and humiliate Bryce Cousland, bring him crashing down, make a laughingstock of him. But then I thought better of it. Why settle for revenge when I could have everything that was rightfully mine? Once I doubled what Cousland had paid her for your mother and her silence, the _doña_ of that brothel was only too happy to be my witness. Your father didn't have the backbone to kill her as he ought to have done, which made blackmailing him ridiculously simple. We hammered it all out and struck our bargain years ago, when you were just barely weaned. I must say, it's gratifying that you had the consideration to grow up pretty; it's hard for a man to know what he's getting when he barters for a girl so young, but even then you had promise. And now, after all these ages, Highever shall once again be a part of Howe holdings, once you are named as your father's heir and our children inherit the teyrnir."

"Me? But what of Fergus?"

"Not my concern," the arl shrugged, releasing the belt to his own dressing gown. A pale, wrinkled, emaciated chest and skinny, liver-marked flanks emerged. She could not bring herself to look long enough to assess the state of his arousal. "I'm sure your father will find some minor bann's daughter to wed him to and keep him well out of the way."

This was wrong. This was all wrong. She cast her eyes about the rippling and wavering shadows of the bedchamber but nothing she saw there lent any greater sense to all this. Her mother and father would surely have chosen disgrace over selling her to this cruel and wizened old pervert; she knew that in her heart. They would never subject her to such a fate. They'd meant her for...

(_the king_)

...greater things than this.

There was no help for it, unless she could find grounds to have the marriage annulled. The Chantry made no provisions for leaving a marriage simply because it was distasteful, and undutiful children who rejected a marriage contract their parents had negotiated in good faith found themselves cast out with few options.

What was she to do? Could she reject her duty to her family and brave their disgrace and her own to spare herself a lifetime with this man? Surely the Cousland name was strong enough to endure the humiliation! It would all be last year's court gossip in no time.

But if that was true, why hadn't her parents chosen to accept it rather than subject her to this end? Was there more to it than simply her mother's past?

She was still pondering those questions when his wrinkled hand seized the coverlets and began to draw them away from her. When she refused to relinquish them, he gave a forceful jerk and flung them away. Covering herself with her hands was ridiculous and futile, but she tried nonetheless until he grabbed one of her wrists in one hand and pulled it away. His other hand felt positively reptilian as he groped her breast crudely, with no attempt at artistry or arousal. He handled her like a slab of meat, kneading and clutching.

The longer he pawed at her, the more uncomfortable it became, for he made dissatisfied grunts and sighs and gripped her flesh harder, pinching and squeezing roughly. When she whimpered in discomfort, he made a satisfied sound and his touches took on a new sense of urgency. Rìona was certain the soft skin of her breast would bear bruises and began to fight against him, until she became aware that her protestations and struggles were arousing him.

Only when she ceased resisting did he give another disgruntled snort and pull away. She dared a glance to see that he was barely aroused at all, his shaft lying limply in its nest of dark gray hair. Relief flooded through her; no wonder he'd ordered the wedding party from the room before the traditional disrobing of the groom the bedding custom called for. If he was incapable, perhaps she would be spared the ordeal of submitting to him after all.

Howe sat back upon the bed, panting. "Come here, girl, and use your mouth. Let's see what whore's tricks you inherited from your mother."

Rìona stared at him in revulsion. In her mind, horror at the very notion warred against a soul-deep certainty that she knew precisely how to perform the act he was demanding.

How could she possibly know such a thing?

With the realization of that knowledge came a defiance she hadn't known she possessed. For the first time, something felt _right._ She sat up, clutching an arm over her aching, bruised breasts. "You may pummel me unconscious, but I shall do no such thing."

He laughed, this horrid man who was her husband. "Of that I have no doubt," he said, cackling. "I am quite certain I will have to beat you frequently, and even more certain I will enjoy it immensely. Whatever latitude your father has allowed you, you shall have none from me. You will learn to obey or you will suffer the consequences. Do as I've commanded."

"Do your worst, you disgusting worm of a man, but I will _not_!"

"You will!" Quick as a striking viper, his hand lashed out, the backs of his knuckles rocking her head to the side. Before the bright sparkles of light had faded from her vision, he had a handful of her hair, jerking her close as Rìona cried out in pain.

"Do you think beating is the worst I can do to you?" he almost purred, and Rìona could feel a stirring that said he was excited by the struggle, or more specifically, by hurting her.

"You can do naught else, you vile toad. You tied your own hands when you wed me!" she declared wildly, with an hysterical laugh. "My family are now your kin! Denounce my mother as a whore and you disgrace yourself by association."

"I can still break you, _wife_, make no mistake," he vowed, jerking her head back and wrenching another cry of pain from her lips. "I've been married once to a harridan when I was young and had need of the dowry. I will not permit it again. You will obey me tonight or tomorrow, once our guests have departed Vigil's Keep, you will kneel naked in the courtyard, servicing every dog in my kennel before the entire assembled guard, the knights, and all the servants. Afterward, the maids will empty the chamberpots upon you and every servant down to the lowest scullion and stable-boy will be commanded to piss on you. You will sleep tethered upon the midden-heap, a feast for the biting insects and stinging swarms of flies. And that's just the first week you'll spend as my wife until you learn to obey."

She did as he commanded, feeling sick with loathing. He smelled like the room, fusty and old and unclean. But it wasn't a human odor, of sweat and skin and muscle. It was the odor of dust and decay, of rotten wet leaves and moldering, moth-eaten fabric. He smelled as wrong as everything else about this, her wedding night, felt. And the texture of him, soft and malleable within her mouth as she tried with little success to arouse him, was pulpy and revolting. Rìona shuddered in distaste.

"Ignorant slut!" Howe sneered, slapping her away when she'd failed to bring him to more than half erect. "I will not be humiliated before our guests! Lie back and spread yourself."

The defiance that had burned so hotly for those few short moments when she had felt that strange certainty and knowledge had fled her, leaving her confused and unsure of her ability to resist again. So Rìona obeyed, knowing her very quiescence, this unaccustomed compliance, to be inherently _wrong_ in some indefinable way. She stared in dry-eyed dread at the cobweb-covered canopy of the bed-curtains as her husband knelt above her. Though his hand moved frantically upon his member, his body would not meet his will. It flopped back down, again and again, no matter how he rubbed and tugged and pulled.

He lay upon her and moved, grinding and thrusting against her. In her mind, other faces swam above hers. The king, beautiful and fair and golden, looking down at her in fevered adoration. A handsome, dark-haired man (_Daveth_, her mind whispered) she couldn't quite place. A cultured, slightly older man with auburn hair and a plaited forelock. A bearded, battle-worn face with a dark Rivaini complexion and fierce, deep-brown eyes she remembered as her parent's friend and confidante. Duncan, whom she hadn't seen in years.

With each imagined face came a sense of rightness, so powerfully contrasted against the wrongness in which she was now immersed. But she could practically smell and taste their skin against hers. It felt right. It felt _real._

How could she possibly remember being with them when she never had been?

Rìona screamed in agony when he sank his teeth into her shoulder and worried at it like a mabari pup with a teething toy, and only then did she feel him stiffen against her belly. He pulled away, the tip leaving a cold trail of slime across her skin as he began fumbling to find his way between her folds. Then he went still and grunted, his face turning nearly puce as hot fluid splashed against her sex and thighs. He collapsed upon her, shivering and sweating as though with an ague, panting against her breast.

Rìona feared she might vomit upon him as she felt his seed cooling on her skin. But at least it wasn't within her. Perhaps she need not fear conceiving his child.

_(but I'm already with child)_

Rìona started at the thought, her entire body jerking in shock. How could that be?

"Useless whore," Howe spat breathlessly, rolling off her body and rising. He placed one hand on her chest between her breasts, holding her down, and the other forced its way between her thighs where his seed pooled and congealed. "I think you made me do that on purpose."

"I didn't—" she began to protest, but too late. Certainty and knowledge ebbed. Confusion and forgetfulness rushed in to replace it. The two states rolled back and forth over one another, surging and retreating.

His fingers slammed into her, stiff and brutal, tearing through her maidenhead and bringing another scream to her lips as tears stung her eyes. It burned and ached, but with the pain came another vision. Once again it was the king above her, his golden hair falling forward and framing his face as he took her.

That. The memory of Cailan. That was real. That was right. It was the king she had seduced, the king whose child she carried.

How was that possible?

Howe wiped his fingers upon the begrimed bed linens and stared at the stains, grimacing in dissatisfaction. As Rìona's mind struggled to reconcile the memory of losing her virginity upon the king's bed with what had just happened, her husband fetched a dagger from a nearby weapons rack and approached with it.

"I advise you to hold still," he said coldly and nicked her inner thigh with the blade. He set the dagger aside and squeezed the flesh to make the blood well up and drip down upon the sheets. The pain brought her back to herself and she opened her eyes and pushed herself up off the bedding.

"This isn't real," she said, grabbing the dagger and scrambling away from him. She stumbled and tripped over oddly placed furniture in the strangely shadowed and blurred bedchamber. Howe stalked after her, seeming to grow larger as he approached. That wasn't right. The Arl of Amaranthine was a small, scrawny man. The one who approached her was huge, nearly as large as a qunari...

Qunari.

Sten.

Sten. Wynne. Leliana. Morrigan. Alistair. The names flooded back to her, and with them the memory of the Circle Tower and all it had contained. Blood mages, demons and abominations.

The Fade. She was in the Fade. The realm of spirits and demons, where the soul traveled when one died or dreamt.

Did that mean she was dead?

"Why do you resist me?" Howe asked, drawing closer as she retreated. "I've given you everything you could possibly desire. Your parents are alive, your family respectable, and your secret safe."

"None of this is real!" Rìona cried, brandishing the dagger. A growling sound caught her attention and she glanced aside to see both the warhounds approaching, snarling and drooling. The demon masquerading as Howe charged her while she was distracted and died easily upon the dagger. The mabari were a bit more difficult to kill, and Rìona sustained two savagely painful bites that ripped into her flesh. Still, they were far easier opponents than they ought to have been.

The room shimmered when the second warhound fell dead and in the far corner some sort of spire or pedestal appeared, glowing with its own strangely diffused light. Bleeding from her bite wounds, and still clutching the bloody dagger, Rìona dug through the drawers and cupboards and chests of the bedchamber, looking for healing herbs for poultices. When none could be found, she noticed a glowing blue-green cluster of what appeared to be gems and stones nestled incongruously near the hearth. It was the same shade as the lyrium dust Morrigan used to make potions. The cluster's very presence seemed to compel her to touch it, and when she did, she felt and saw her wounds miraculously begin to close of their own volition. Even the ragged bite Howe had left on her shoulder, and the aching pain between her thighs faded.

She felt the tingle of renewed energy and, Maker, it felt good. Terrifyingly good. Suddenly Rìona understood just how easily templars might become addicted to lyrium, if this was what it felt like just to touch it.

Determined not to touch it again, she drew her dressing gown about her bare body, and gave one last look at the body wearing the face of Rendon Howe. For a moment, a hatred so intense she thought she might scream welled up within her and then she spat upon that wrinkled face.

"_Now_ you've given me what I desire," she sneered, and turned her attention to the strange pedestal. She could practically feel waves of energy pulsing off it, and she wasn't entirely certain touching it would be a good idea, but for the odd certainty that it was important somehow.

No sooner had she set her hands upon it, though, than she felt herself being _pulled_ from the bedchamber. In an instant, it was gone and she was in a rocky, barren landscape where there awaited a man in a mage's robes, who introduced himself as Niall.


	20. Chapter Twenty: Concupiscence

There was no time in the realm of dreams, the Fade. Rìona had no way of knowing how long she had been there, or what was occurring in the physical realm her body still inhabited. She was alive, she knew that much. She could feel the presence of her body, sometimes giving unconscious twitches and jerks as she struggled through illusion after illusion. She could feel it anchoring her, pulling on her, telling her she _must_ return, even if she could not yet escape.

Instead, with the mage Niall advising her in his hopeless, despairing way, she learned. Learned to traverse the Fade in forms suited to the dreams she passed through. She learned to harness her will to make herself as small and imperceptible as a mouse, and as mighty and unstoppable as one of the great stone golems that had once been crafted by the dwarves, centuries ago. With each dream she traveled through, she learned how to defeat the demons keeping her trapped within it, until at last she could move at will from one dream to the next. And when she gained that ability, she knew how to find her companions.

Each of them existed in his or her own unique dream, giving Rìona perhaps more insight to their most personal desires and fears than she might have liked to have; Sten longing for his qunari brethren again, Wynne mourning the loss of mages in the tower they might yet save, Leliana quieting her troubled soul in the Chantry. And then there was her own nightmare.

Of them, only Morrigan and Sten had not succumbed to the illusion built for them, though Sten had been unwilling to leave even knowing it was a dream. Once Rìona helped the witch dispatch the demon attempting to impersonate Flemeth, Morrigan disappeared, drawn elsewhere in the Fade, just as all the others had done. Leaving Rìona once again alone. The first time it had happened, she'd searched at length for Sten again, but found herself no longer able to reach him simply by thinking of him and setting her will upon it. That had been frustrating, but the only thing she could do was keep moving forward, setting her mind upon the one remaining person in her party she had not yet found here in the realm of dreams.

Alistair.

She focused her will upon him and felt herself drawn through the infinite layers of dreams, the shadowed spires of the Black City always visible in the distance as she passed, until suddenly he was before her.

At first she didn't realize it was him. All she saw was a templar standing motionless, surrounded by mages. Then another templar walked past and handed him a vial, and he removed his helm to reveal himself as Alistair. He stared at the vial longingly, mournfully, and then drank down its contents with a shudder of revulsion, as though it was rasping and bitter. He closed his eyes for a moment of something akin to ecstasy, but when he opened them again, they were filled with an unutterable sorrow.

It made her heart ache just to see it.

As she made her way across the strange, wavering landscape that seemed at times to resembled the stone walls and floors of the Circle Tower, and other times a barren wilderness, two female mages walked past Alistair, looking at him flirtatiously over their shoulders and tittering behind their hands.

"Good evening, Ser Alistair," they giggled and walked away.

Only then did Rìona notice that the mages were exclusively female, and dressed in garments that bore only a passing resemblance to the traditional modest robes Circle mages wore. No two robes were alike; this one had a plunging neckline revealing a swelling set of breasts beneath, that one revealed the mage's slender legs up to mid-thigh, and another exposed a woman's entire back, for she wore no shift or other undergarment to break the line of smooth, bare skin from waist to nape.

Rìona wasn't certain how many mages there were; at least a half-dozen, and likely more. All female, all scandalously under-clad, and many engaging in some form of lewd conduct. The two that had giggled and flirted with Alistair—and Rìona did not fail to note that they strongly resembled herself and the barmaid Bella—were now embracing, stroking each other through their robes, kissing passionately.

Rìona's eyebrows lifted.

Many of the others actually bore a strong likeness to Rìona as well. It was nothing overt; the same color and shape of eyes on this one, or the same hair, or the high cheekbones and narrow chin Rìona had inherited from her mother. One or two had blazing red hair and bore a vague resemblance to Leliana or Bella, and one even seemed to favor Morrigan.

She hadn't been certain what sort of dream she would find Alistair in, but a fantasy of mages cavorting about him like nymphs most certainly would not have been her first assumption. Clearly there was a greater propensity for debauchery in her fellow Warden than he had let on.

"I'm trying to decide," she said casually as she approached him, wondering if he would be caught up in his dream and believe it to be real as Leliana and Wynne had, or recognize it for an illusion, "if this is your dream, or your nightmare."

"Oh, Maker's blood!" he cursed, blushing a deep crimson shade and turning his face toward the tumultuous, roiling sky of the Fade where the outline of the Black City still hovered. "Of course _you_ would have to see this!"

"And that distresses you?"

"Well, yeah," replied Alistair in a tone that clearly questioned her intelligence. "I feel like I tried for days to find my way out of here, but everywhere I turned, there was just more of _these_... women... demons... whatever."

"Demons," Rìona supplied helpfully. "We'll have to kill them before we can leave here."

Alistair stared at her incredulously. "_That's_ all it would have taken?"

"Let me guess. _Killing_ them was not your first instinct?" He shifted and glanced away, glowering at the ground. "Well, if it's any consolation, you're doing far better than I fared at first, for you have not been taken in by the illusion."

"No, maybe only for a moment at first... I just _knew_ it was wrong. I knew I wasn't a templar, knew that mages don't _really_ behave this way... What?"

Rìona realized she had been staring. "I just... I suppose I hadn't realized your will was that strong, to allow you to see through the illusion."

"What was _your_ illusion?" he asked.

"I found myself forced to submit to a future of pain, degradation and humiliation, a future without hope of pleasure," she answered, her eyes growing distant. Nothing she had ever done, no matter how perverse, had made her feel shamed and powerless as those moments in her dream with Howe had.

"Pleasure." Alistair's mouth twisted wryly. "It always comes down to that with you, doesn't it?"

"And with you, apparently," Rìona shot back, gesturing about them to where the mages, many partially or fully undressed now, still pleasured one another. If this kept on, it was looking to become an orgy. How many times had Alistair witnessed such a thing while he'd been here? "Tell me, why have you not attempted to kill these demons before now?"

Alistair looked away, shrugging uncomfortably. "I... don't know. They didn't seem... malevolent, I guess. Each time I thought of trying to leave, they would begin... _that_ and the next thing I knew, I found myself standing here doing nothing."

"Watching them."

"Yes." He hung his head shamefully. "I guess that doesn't make me much better than you, does it?"

"There is no 'better' or 'worse,' you self-righteous prig!" Exasperated, Rìona rounded on him, the words of her oft-repeated monologue springing readily to her lips. "There is no greater force in all this world than desire. It can build and destroy whole civilizations. Desire for wealth, for revenge, for pleasure, for power, for love. Every day we are caught up in the tides and eddies of it, moved by it in countless ways, great and small. It is a part of you just as it is a part of me. The only difference between us is that I accept my desire and have learned to use it to my advantage, while you struggle vainly against yours."

As abruptly as her anger had come upon her, it subsided. Rìona sighed. "I don't want to quarrel with you, Alistair. Come, let's just leave here."

She began to move toward the entwined mages, but stopped after a few steps and realized Alistair was not with her. She turned with a rebuke on her lips only to find him riveted, staring at the pair of mages that resembled her and Bella.

The two were now moaning in pleasure as they entwined, bodies contorted and legs interlocked in such a way that their mounds ground against one another as they moved vigorously. Occasionally they moved apart to kiss, hands groping, tongues thrusting almost violently, only to resume grinding with an almost savage energy, until the sweat of exertion shone on both of them, their hair plastered to their faces.

Finding herself staring, Rìona began to understand something of Alistair's difficulty leaving. The scene was compelling, and she could feel desire tightening within her, even though she knew the body she had here was no more real than anything else.

"You never answered my question," she said, loudly enough to draw Alistair's attention away from the display.

"What question?" His voice was strained.

"Is this your dream, or your nightmare?"

"Nightmare," he said, opening his gauntlet to reveal the empty lyrium vial within. "Definitely. You don't seem to appreciate just how close I almost came to this."

He let the vial drop and it shattered with a merry, tinkling sound at his feet that was at odds with the desolation on his face.

"Alistair." Rìona shook her head in bemusement. "What a conundrum you present."

"In what regard?"

"Clearly the prospect of a lifetime of chastity, and all the other pitfalls of being a templar, frightens you out of your wits, and yet you waited for Duncan to rescue you rather than simply refusing to take your vows."

"You don't understand," he said with a shudder. "When I protested going to the monastery, Arl Eamon told me that things could go badly for me if I was perceived to pose a threat to the succession. Cailan was still young at that time, of course, but the arl said he didn't know what sort of ruler Cailan would turn out to be. My father might protect me but, if Maric was gone and Cailan turned out to be ruthless, I might be imprisoned or worse, rather than be allowed the opportunity to create instability for the throne. Eamon said he wouldn't be able to help me if it came to that. He said sending me to the monastery was the best chance of keeping me out of all that."

"Oh, Maker!" Rìona closed her eyes, groaning. Andraste's mercy, what must such a warning have sounded like to a ten-year-old boy, frightened and grieved at being sent away from the only home he'd ever known? What sort of man was Arl Eamon, to let his wife bully a child and then send the boy away with a warning like that ringing in his ears? Was the Arl of Redcliffe simply that obtuse, expecting so young a child to understand political realities, or was he deliberately trying to browbeat the lad who stood in potential contention with Eamon's own blood nephew?

"But you're away from that now," she told him after a pause. "You're free of it, and yet it still has such a hold on you. You still let the Chantry think for you rather than forming your own opinions. You long to experience it all yourself, yet you turn and run like someone has set your backside afire when pleasure is freely offered to you."

"_Too_ freely," he retorted. "If I had come to your tent that night when you asked me, what would have happened the next day? Or when you tumbled Bella in the stables, or Morrigan, or Teagan! Do I just accept that I was never more than one face in a parade of many?" He shook his head. "No. I want more than that. That's not the Chantry speaking. That's me."

She blinked, stunned by his vehemence. "I... Very well. That's certainly your choice, and I don't think any less of you for it. But what then of this smug disdain you bear toward others who embrace the pleasures for which you secretly yearn?"

"You embrace pleasure, sure, but what about affection? Or commitment?"

Rìona laughed. "Do those things need to be mutually exclusive with pleasure? Even pleasure freely exercised?"

He gawked at her. "You're joking, right?"

"Not at all," she said earnestly. "My father embraced my mother, despite the fact that she was a whore when he met her, and adored her all the days of his life. But she did not lie only with him; instead, they chose her lovers together, both those they took to their bed purely for pleasure, and those she seduced for political gain. She used her courtesan's training to benefit Father, to win allies for the Couslands and extend our influence. Beyond that, occasionally he would merely watch her with another man—a trusted friend, such as Duncan—for no other reason than he wished to see her take her pleasure without his own needs distracting him. He found it beautiful. He never asked her to do that which she was unwilling to do, and she never bedded another without receiving his blessing. Tell me, does that sound like a relationship lacking affection?"

"I never met them," Alistair muttered. "I really couldn't say."

"Do you know my mother willingly stayed behind to die at my father's side rather than flee with Duncan and me?" she asked, tears stinging her eyes. Maker, how she missed them! How she missed the ready touching and affection. How she missed having people she could go to in distress if she simply needed to be comforted or held, without worrying that she would be perceived as weak, or wanton. "Their last words to one another spoke of the good and joyful life they'd had together, and how much they loved each other. Does _that_ strike you as a relationship lacking commitment?"

"No," he murmured, looking stricken at the sight of her tears. "I suppose it doesn't."

"If you want to know what might have happened afterward, had you gone with me to my tent that night, honestly, I can't say. I wasn't thinking beyond the moment, beyond the fact that I needed the touch of another person. It was unfair of me to do that to you, and I apologize," Rìona said softly, after a moment's pause in which she tucked away the grief that had welled up as she discussed her parents. "Was I thinking in terms of commitment? No, I'm sorry, I was not. It's only been a few months since I've been out of Highever, Alistair. Only a few months since I finally had the freedom to begin experiencing these pleasures I studied, but had never known. There's a certain headiness to all of it, really. What I thought was to be my future did not materialize, and now I'm simply finding my way as best I can with the tools I've been given."

"Why did _you_ wait?" Alistair asked abruptly.

"I beg your pardon?"

He shrugged. "You seem to think I'm daft for having gone so long without... being with anyone. But you said you were a maiden when you got to Ostagar. Here you are, past the age when most girls marry. Why did you wait? Surely your family didn't expect you to do so."

"No," Rìona answered with an emphatic shake of her head. "Had I chosen to take a lover, I would have been allowed to do so after my sixteenth Name Day. But there was an... _opportunity_ for an advantageous marriage, and so I made the choice to wait."

Alistair blinked. "You were betrothed?"

"Not formally, no. But when Highever fell, the reason I willingly agreed to go to Ostagar, rather than force Duncan to conscript me, was so that I could seek out the man I was meant to marry and secure the alliance." She took a deep breath, knowing this was the time she should tell him about Cailan, and yet... for the first time in days, it seemed they were truly speaking with one another, trying to understand each other. If she told him how she had set out to seduce the king and become the queen, that might all come crashing down. Certainly it would reaffirm his disdain for her. "At any rate, he and I reached an understanding, but before it could be formalized, well... I needn't tell you what his fate was."

He stared at her. "You lost your intended at Ostagar and you never said anything?"

"What was there to say?" Rìona asked with a shrug. "It wasn't as though I loved him. I'm not even certain I liked him all that much. He was, however, my best chance of seeing justice done for my family. If I mourned for anything after that battle, besides my brother, it was the wreck of my hopes for justice, not him."

Alistair had no response to that, but Rìona was pleased to note his defensive posture had softened. When he looked once again at the demons masquerading as scantily-clad mages, his eyes were speculative, as though seeing them in terms of what pleasure he might derive from any or all of them, rather than simply the torment of what he could not have. It was a long moment before he met her eyes again, but that guarded reserve that had been there since that night in Redcliffe was gone.

Alistair swallowed hard. "I'm not saying you're right. I'm not saying I could ever... be like your father was with your mother. But... I think I understand a little better now just where you're coming from. I can't guarantee much success, but I will _try_ not to make such a scene about it in the future, even if I don't really approve. And I'm sorry."

Rìona frowned. "Whatever for?"

"For your parents. For your loss. For being an ass and calling you a harlot."

She laughed at that. "You're not an ass, Alistair. I daresay most of the time I even enjoy your company. Now a prig... perhaps, but we can work on that. You certainly have an _interesting_ imagination," she teased, glancing at the mages, whose moans and cries of pleasure were threatening to drown out any conversation.

"And thank you," she continued. "I... regret that you discovered the truth about me the way you did. I can see how that must have been shocking for you, coming from your upbringing, and I'm afraid I haven't been very understanding or respectful of your reservations. Stumbling upon me in the stables was an accident, but you didn't consent to be witness to the ritual with Morrigan. I should have found a way to warn you, rather than forcing it upon you."

Alistair nodded in acceptance of her apology. "Well... if it hadn't been such a shock, I might have enjoyed it far more. At least the stables, that is; I don't want to think about Morrigan like that. _Please_ don't make me," he begged with a hint of desperation.

It was the fact that he kept making her laugh, Rìona thought, that made her enjoy his company even when he _was_ being a self-righteous prude. "Have no fear, it's not a memory I'm eager to relive either. Now, Bella, on the other hand..." Rìona flung him a flirtatious smile and was pleased to see him blush.

"Stop. I'm having enough trouble getting to any proper... condition for fighting these demons," he warned, then snapped his mouth shut as though unable to believe his own daring in saying such a thing. Rìona laughed again, delighted that he could bend enough to make a bawdy joke.

"A fact they seem to be counting upon, if this display is any indication," An idea dawned upon her. "Is _that_ why you haven't managed to make it out of here, yet?"

His blush deepened. "Maybe we could... not talk about that," he proposed in a tight voice, squirming. "Reservations, and all that? Perhaps even just forget I mentioned it?"

"As you wish," she nodded. "Only..."

He groaned. "Only what?"

"I'm sorry, Alistair," she said carefully. "I don't mean to intrude where you're obviously not comfortable, but at some point we do need to leave here. I don't know how long our bodies have been sleeping while we've been in the Fade. Hours, or perhaps even days. I can feel that my body is hungry, though, a distant nagging in the back of my mind like when being too cold or uncomfortable intrudes into your dream, without actually waking you enough to make you do something about it. We can't persist this way indefinitely."

"Yes," he said thoughtfully, his gaze growing distant as he tried to focus upon his body. "But sometimes you can make yourself wake up from a dream. And I can't do that here."

"No, these demons are keeping the dream too powerful. Once they are dead, you will be able to move out of here and elsewhere into the Fade. But my point is... however illusory our bodies are here, the state of them seems to affect our ability to function here just as it would in the physical world. Thus, if you have a _condition_ which is preventing you being able to fight..."

"Oh, Maker! Is _that_ what this has all been about? These... mages, I mean, demons? Doing that?"

"I can't say, but since you don't really believe your future as a templar would have involved mages conducting sapphic orgies right before your eyes, it seems likely."

"Blast it all," he muttered. "Can you not call it that? It's not helping. Anyway, there's nothing much I can do about _that._ It's... worse than it ever is in the waking world. More painful. _Much_ more. Even if I close my eyes, I can't stop hearing them. They just keep going, and the harder I try to leave, the more... enthusiastic they get."

"Well, the form we have here is not truly physical," Rìona offered. "It responds to our will. If your will is strong enough to see through the illusion, perhaps you can simply dismiss your... condition."

"Really?" Hope lit Alistair's eyes, but his question was punctuated by a long, warbling cry of pleasure from one of the mages. He shuddered. "Right. That's not likely to happen. Now I see where mages get a reputation for being a lascivious lot."

Startled, Rìona stared at him. "What did you just say?"

"Do I honestly need to repeat it?"

"No, I mean about mages."

"I said they have a reputation for being... what?"

"What? Oh, nothing," she dismissed the thought with a shake of her head. "It doesn't matter now. Just a question that has been plaguing me for some time seems to be coming closer to an answer. Anyway, back to your, ahem, dilemma."

"What happened to respecting boundaries?"

"I need you in fighting form, Alistair. You put me in charge of this absurd troop we're gathering, after all."

"Somehow I never suspected it would entail conversations such as this."

"If you cannot avoid reacting to the display the demons are putting on, or dismiss your reaction by dint of will, perhaps the thing to do is to let that reaction have its natural conclusion," Rìona proposed as gently as she could manage.

"_What?_"

"Maker's breath, Alistair, I'm sorry, but if I have to keep repeating myself for the sake of your outraged sensibilities, we'll never get out of here."

"Right. Sorry." He gritted his teeth, his face a deep crimson. "You're saying I should... _finish?_"

"Well, I'm all out of impotence potions, you see," she quipped. "So, yes. Terribly sorry."

"Oh, right, the mockery is going to help. Keep going, please." Alistair groaned again, covering his face with his gauntlet-encased hands. "I suppose you have a suggestion for just how I'm supposed to accomplish this task?"

Rìona smiled. "I figured I would leave that up to you and try to give you as much privacy as I could. Were you any other man, I'd offer to assist, but..."

"Sure, that would be lovely. For all of five seconds," he said with an ironic twist of his lips. "Then would come the red face and agony of humiliation."

"You just haven't had the opportunity to practice," she shrugged. "Stamina and endurance improve upon repetition, you know."

"Riiiight. I'll be sure to add that to my daily routine, immediately before sword practice."

"And why not?" she demanded crisply, a trifle annoyed at his dismissive attitude, and at her tone he turned his eyes from a pair of passionately intertwined mages to meet her gaze. "The first lesson a courtesan learns is to pleasure herself, for without knowing her own pleasure, how can she possibly understand how to pleasure another? It's all well and good to want to wait for the right person and the right time. Believe it or not, I actually did much the same-though admittedly my definition of 'right' had less to do with sentimentality and more to do with opportunism. But there's nothing to keep you from pleasuring yourself while you wait."

"I do—I mean, I _have_... sometimes. Occasionally. Rarely. I rather think that falls into the category of activities frowned upon by the Chantry for templar initiates," Alistair replied, squirming. His eyes darted back to the mages, one of whom was presently sucking the breasts of the other as her fingers moved in and out of the other mage's body. He closed his eyes and swallowed hard, forcing his gaze back to Rìona.

"Yes, well, we've already been over my opinions on that particular matter, and I don't think they bear revisiting."

"You honestly mean for me to do this?" asked Alistair, something akin to panic in his eyes.

"If you can resolve the issue yourself by other means in a timely fashion, feel free to do so."

"How? I mean, I can't rightly take off my armor if we're planning to fight."

"As I said, our forms here are not truly physical," Rìona explained. "If we had the time, I'd teach you to will yourself to become a golem. That would resolve the issue, but it took me what I think was hours to learn that. But the point is, an imagined touch can be as real as an actual touch. All you have to do is will it to be so."

"All right. I'll... try," he agreed, sounding miserable at the prospect.

"I'll be over there," Rìona said encouragingly, gesturing at a spot back the way she had come. "I'm sorry I can't offer you more privacy than that, but if the demons attack I'd rather be within range."

She waited for some time, trying not to glance at Alistair for fear she might inhibit him. Moments stretched on and on, and she could hear no masculine moans or gasps over the erotic chorus of the mage-demons. Finally she dared dart a quick glance at Alistair to find that he was not concentrating on pleasuring himself, but that he had turned his hopeless gaze upon her, and was pleading silently with his eyes for assistance he could not bring himself to actually request.

Slowly, Rìona returned to him, giving him as much opportunity to refuse her approach as she could. He simply watched her advance, his shoulders slumped in defeat.

"I suppose if it's just in the Fade, in a dream, it doesn't really count, right?" he muttered.

A wry smile curved her lips. "Don't worry, Alistair. Your virtue is safe with me."

"Really? I mean... I thought... Aren't you coming to... assist?"

"Close your eyes," she said gently, dropping her voice to a soft murmur. "And listen to my voice. I'll not touch you unless you request it. I'll use words. Nothing more."

"Oh. I guess that's all right," he stammered. "I can't see the Chantry objecting to that."

"Andraste's tits, I'm sick to death of hearing what the Chantry would and wouldn't approve," Rìona snapped peevishly.

"Sorry. I was just trying to make a joke."

"Were you? You're free of that, Alistair. If you wish to remain chaste, I respect that. But let your reasons for it be your own, not theirs. Quit letting them have such a hold on you. Now close your eyes."

He obeyed, releasing a shuddering sigh as he did so.

"For the sake of the woman... or women... or men, for that matter," she added, ignoring his noise of protest, "with whom you will someday lie, I'm going to encourage you to remember this the next time you're alone in your tent."

"I doubt there's much chance I'll be able to forget," he replied, his voice strained. The mage who had been enjoying herself with the breasts of the other was now on her back, her knees bent and parted, while the other mage blew a teasing hint of magical frost across her folds.

"Ah, but there's remembering, and then there's _remembering_. Keep in mind, our will affects our form here. Imagine your hands. Let them begin to explore your body, much as those two are doing there to one another. Imagine they belong to someone else, perhaps one of _them_, or perhaps to another you desire. Don't just go straight for your shaft and rub yourself to completion," she cautioned, ignoring his strangled sound of discomfort. "Take your time with it. Allow the hands to wander your body, to seek out what is most sensitive. What's ticklish? What makes your gut clench with a sudden surge of arousal? What makes you hard?

"Is it the curve of your neck, where it meets your shoulder? Or perhaps the shell of your ear. Or maybe your nipple. Does it respond to a light, teasing touch? Or to something harder? A firm stroke, such as you might receive from a tongue? A pinch, fingers closing gently around it as it becomes erect, then squeezing, harder, _harder,_ until the touch hovers on the brink of pain. Or, if you are so inclined, even crosses that line."

"Oh, sweet Andraste..." Alistair breathed.

"Run your hands down your belly, feeling the skin ripple and twitch. Those hollows just below your hip bones, let your fingers dance across them. Let them run lightly over the soft skin where your hip meets your belly. Ah, and now you want to take hold of your cock, but don't. Make yourself wait. Enjoy the anticipation. _Tease_ yourself. Run your fingernails lightly down the inside of your thighs. Reach back behind your shaft and stroke the skin of your sac, softly... oh, so softly! Cup it and squeeze.

"When you finally turn your attention to your shaft, explore it. Learn every inch of it like you would your best beloved. Feel that hard tendon on the back side just above where it meets your sac. Know the slide of the foreskin as you slowly pull it back and let the head emerge. Know the ridge at the base of the head, and don't neglect the frenulum, that sensitive spot on the back of the shaft where that ridge tapers down into the shaft itself. Tease the slit in the head, using the fluid that emerges to enhance the pleasure of your palm rubbing slow circles against the tip."

Alistair's eyes clenched, his fists in their gauntlets clenched on his thighs. His attention was no longer on the two illusory mages pleasuring one another. Instead, he swayed as though mesmerized, his body trembling. Rìona watched him, unwilling to move even a little and break the moment. Her own body clenched and quivered with longing, for the transport on his face was beautiful to behold. She wanted to escalate the matter, make her words reality. She wanted to take him into her hands and listen to his moans, to stroke him to completion and lick his seed off her hands when he was done. Instead, she used words and ignored her own arousal to concentrate on his.

"Only when you can't stand another moment do you take your shaft in hand and begin to stroke. Slowly at first, and then gaining speed. Imagine that the gliding of your skin up and down the shaft is the sheath of your partner, that you're sliding inside her, that the clench of your fist is her sex, closing around you, embracing you. Hear her moans in your mind, her sighs, her soft whimpers for _more_. As you feel your climax approaching, try to fight it off, force it back, so that you may give your lover just one more moment of pleasure. Hold it off as long as possible and let it build, and build, and build, until control is lost and it bursts forth. Envision your lover taking your seed inside herself, tasting you on her tongue. Taste yourself, to know what she experiences."

Alistair's face reddened. His head fell back and he gave a low growl, shaking violently. Beneath the long crimson skirt of the templar armor, she could not see the results her words had wrought, but his ragged, panting told her what she needed to know.

"Maker's breath, how did you do that?" he gasped at last.

"Words and images can be very potent weapons," she said, smiling softly. "For some, they are even a fetish. Wielded properly they can bring enormous pleasure, and my education was no less attentive to that aspect of seduction than to any other."

"I don't know whether to be mortified, or to beg you to do that again."

"Do it for yourself, next time you're alone," she answered. "If you were wondering, _that_ is how endurance and stamina is built, and also how you learn to please your partner. How can you ever expect to give another pleasure if you don't know what pleasure is yourself?"

"I can hardly wait to get back to my tent."

Rìona laughed, delighted to see him so unselfconscious for once. "Then my work here is done!" she announced. "I'll make a proper libertine out of you yet." She gave him a moment more to absorb her words, then rose. "Now... are you ready to leave this place?"

The mages stopped pleasuring one another and were approaching, obviously intent on attempting to stop them.

"Definitely." It wasn't until he rose that Alistair grimaced and squirmed uncomfortably. "Oh, of all the bloody— _This_ isn't exactly an optimal condition for fighting, either."

"Will it away, and let's go."

"Will it away. Right." After a moment's pause, Alistair gave a wicked grin and drew his sword, charging the advancing mages and flinging them back with a wave of holy energy.


	21. Chapter Twenty One: Nadir

Rìona wept when she awoke on the grimy floor of the Circle Tower facing the dead, staring eyes of the mage, Niall. Here was another she could not save, for he had been in the Fade too long, while his body lay drained by the abomination inhabited by the demon, Sloth. He'd been so hopeless, so despairing, but he had helped her as best he could, and given her the key to defeat Uldred and his blood mages.

The Litany of Adralla.

Her companions, who had seen her final talk with Niall in the Fade, were confused by her distress. She could not explain to them that she had hoped to awaken and find him alive after all, that it had merely been his pessimism and the way that the Fade eventually began to drain all hope from one that had led him to believe his body was no longer alive.

Her tears, though bitter, were short-lived, and then Rìona rose and brushed herself off, turning her attention forward. Somewhere in this final floor of the Circle Tower she would find more survivors. She must.

"Are you all right?" Leliana asked as Rìona pressed ahead.

"Yes, of course," answered Rìona, looking down. "I find myself wondering... where would we have found Aodhán, had he survived and been brought here? Would he be among the countless corpses of fallen mages we've passed? Or among the defenders of the tower, like Niall, desperately giving their final breath to salvage something of the disaster Uldred has wrought here? Among the blood mages we've slain, using any means to win their freedom? Or would he be one of these faceless abominations we've fought, never knowing which mage they once were?"

"I am sure he would have done what is right," the bard said reassuringly.

Rìona turned an embittered gaze upon her. "And what precisely is right, anymore? We're killing far more mages than we're saving."

For that, Leliana had no ready answer.

It was the next group of abominations that undid her.

As with the previous ones, they attacked immediately and savagely. Rìona held back for a moment, seeking to find some way to communicate with them, as they had been able to do with the Sloth abomination. Leliana paid the price for that hesitation when an abomination Rìona might have incapacitated got past Alistair and Sten. The bard took a vicious wound to her bicep that immediately sent blood pouring down her arm. She struggled to keep her aim accurate after Sten had engaged the abomination which had attacked her.

Once all the creatures were dead, Rìona rushed to Leliana's side to see what her ambivalence had cost them, her face a mask of anguish.

"I'm so very sorry," Rìona said as Leliana gritted her teeth against the pain. Wynne examined the wound, and then her hands began to glow as she set them on either side of the deep gash. Slowly, the flesh began to knit together and Leliana's face relaxed. "That would not have happened had I not hesitated."

"What exactly did you think you would accomplish, trying to talk to these creatures?" an irate Sten demanded.

"Clearly, some of them can communicate and don't immediately attack," she answered defensively. "The Sloth abomination could. Perhaps others can as well!"

"Did you ever think that communicating with them might _not_ be a good thing?" Alistair asked. "After all, look what happened to us with the Sloth abomination. We can't afford to get sucked into the Fade again for hours."

"The demon who ensorcelled that templar with visions of a wife and family also communicated, and we weren't drawn into the Fade then. It tried to convince us it meant us no harm, that it only wished to be left alone with the templar." Rìona cast her gaze about desperately, seeking to bring some order to her jumbled thoughts. "And Connor communicated as well and didn't immediately attack. I learned much about these demons while we were in the Fade, for that was the key to winning our freedom. Rage. Hunger. Sloth. Desire. Pride. Some are more powerful and intelligent than others. If we can just find one who communicates, perhaps we may... treat with them."

"_You don't treat with demons!_" Alistair yelled. "Are you _insane?_ That's how you end up possessed yourself!"

"What shall we do then, Alistair?" Rìona demanded, dashing away impotent tears as they shone in her eyes. She gestured at the dead abomination at her feet. "Kill our own army before we even have a chance to assemble it? _These_ are the mages we came here to recruit! You cannot convince me they were all blood mages."

"No," Wynne said thoughtfully. "Even Uldred and all his Libertarians cannot account for the number of abominations we've seen. If I had to guess, I would say that the Veil has been torn and the demons getting through are possessing the mages who survived the initial attack. But this shouldn't be happening. Any mage strong enough to pass the Harrowing should be able to resist forcible possession, from all but perhaps the strongest of demons, so long as the mage does not become distracted."

"Uldred was possessed forcibly," Rìona pointed out. "Niall was in the meeting. He said Uldred tried to summon a demon when Irving would not let him go, and the demon overwhelmed him."

"Then it was a strong demon indeed that he summoned," answered Wynne. "For Uldred was a capable mage, if a thoroughly unlikeable fellow. As for these others... I cannot say. They're not powerful enough to make me believe they were all possessed by force, and yet I cannot believe they would willingly succumb."

Rìona gestured to the scroll tucked into her belt pouch. "What about Uldred's blood magic?"

"You mean do I think he may be forcing these mages to agree to possession with mind domination?" Wynne's eyes narrowed. "Yes. Yes, you may be right."

"I don't see what that has to do with anything," Alistair said stubbornly.

"We're killing _victims_, Alistair," Rìona said softly. "These are innocents who were simply going about their day in the Tower until Uldred unleashed his chaos. Shouldn't we be trying to save them, as we did Connor?"

"The boy you mentioned?" Wynne asked. "I assume you sent a mage into the Fade to confront the demon, then? Yes, that can be done in the case of a willing possession. If the demon was slain in the Fade, it would sever the connection."

"Surely we can do the same here, then, if these mages were possessed by coercion?" Rìona asked, her eyes brightening. "Can we save them?"

"Save them? You mean—oh, no." Alistair moaned, understanding her intent.

Rìona turned to look at the witch. "Is it possible, Morrigan? Is it possible to send a mage into the Fade as we did before, to confront the demons and drive them out of these abominations, as we did with Connor?"

"No," Morrigan answered decisively. "Oh, we've lyrium aplenty now, so we wouldn't have to use blood, and with the Veil so weak here, the sex rite would suffice in the absence of the usual number of mages required for such a thing. But the logistics of tracking down each of the demons possessing a mage here back to their origin in the Fade and slaying them are nearly impossible. In Redcliffe the Veil was relatively sound, and there was only one demon to contend with, and yet it took me hours to locate the demon and dispatch it, and it was not a particularly strong demon. Here, the Veil is much more porous, and the demons are too numerous to be counted."

"Blood? Sex rite?" Wynne asked, narrowing her eyes at Morrigan, her posture becoming rigid, as though bracing herself for battle. "Are you a blood mage, then?"

"I am not," Morrigan replied, giving Wynne a disdainful glance. "The mage we encountered in Redcliffe, however, was. In the absence of your Circle, we availed ourselves of his abilities."

Wynne turned her concerned gaze to Rìona. "Is this true?"

Sighing, Rìona nodded. "It was a choice between blood magic, or killing a child, or risking the safety of an entire village," she admitted, carefully leaving out the mention of a human sacrifice. "I do not condone blood magic, but given my alternatives at the time, it seemed the best option."

The Circle mage relented, though she clearly looked cross to find her newfound allies had even dabbled with such things. Rìona dismissed it; there was no time now.

"What can we do to get around the logistical issue?" she asked instead. "Surely there must be some connection between here and the Fade, some way to trace the demons back to their origin."

"At least some of the difficulty I had at Redcliffe was that I was not in the boy's presence when I entered the Fade and could not follow the link between him and the demon directly. I had to locate the magical filament binding the two and track it to its source. If I were in the abomination's presence, however, 'twould make the matter much simpler," the witch answered thoughtfully. "But of course, if I were in such a one's presence, it would attack before the rite could be conducted."

"Which brings us back to the problem of convincing them not to attack," Rìona said, her shoulders slumping hopelessly. "Even if we could find one of the intelligent ones with whom we could communicate, once it—he, _she_—learned our intentions, the abomination would attack. Maker's balls!" she cursed in disgust.

Morrigan looked troubled, stroking her hand over the leather cover of the grimoire they had found in a locked chest in the First Enchanter's study. Despite the tension between them, Rìona had been true to her word and handed the tome over, and Morrigan had spoken to her more warmly and gratefully than had been her wont since they had disagreed over the matter of Rìona's pregnancy en route to Redcliffe. When the witch lifted her eyes once more, they were conflicted.

"I have a thought, though I doubt you'll thank me for it," she said at last, her voice reluctant. Whatever emotion had been in her eyes faded, and she looked as impassive and untouched as ever.

"Tell me," Rìona said desperately.

"The sex rite is intended to generate enough magical energy to open the Veil in the absence of blood or lyrium, and allow the participant to pass though, without crudely tearing the Veil. Any mage with lyrium can pass into the Fade, after all. The reason such a procedure normally requires a number of mages is to control the opening of the Veil and seal the rift once it is no longer needed."

Rìona nodded. "I'm listening."

"The rite allows the _participant_ in the sex act to pass through," Morrigan repeated, her gaze strangely intent. "Rather than send a mage through, who would then have to track down and defeat each of the demons in the Fade one after the other, we could instead send the _demons_ back through... were they to be the participants in the sex rite."

"_What?_" Alistair practically screamed. "Are you actually proposing someone have sex with these... _things?_"

"Oh, Maker. Not 'someone,' Alistair. _Me._" Rìona groaned, closing her eyes. "No. I can't. A harlot I may be, but even I have my limits. I can't... fuck a demon."

"As you wish," Morrigan inclined her head in assent. "It is of no matter to me. Come. I am sure we have many more abominations to slay before we are done here."

Rìona opened her eyes to glare at the witch.

"Even if you were to do such a dangerous and ill-advised thing, Warden," Wynne said sternly, placing a hand on Rìona's shoulder and giving Morrigan a hard stare. "It would gain us nothing. Simply sending the demons back to the Fade would not be enough. A connection would still exist, between the mage and the demon. Not a full possession, but the next time the mage tapped into the Fade to draw power for a spell, the demon would be able to find him or her and renew the possession. Imagine being in the middle of battle against the archdemon and having your mages suddenly become abominations, out loose in the world. No, it is impossible. The mages would have to be made Tranquil immediately, never to use magic again, and that would defeat the purpose."

Morrigan contradicted her, her tone soft and yet somehow smug. "Not if the demons were slain as they passed back into the Fade."

"How?" Rìona demanded.

"When the demons cross the Veil, they would have a moment of vulnerability," the witch explained. "A moment when they were disoriented and stunned. And while the Veil remained open, in that moment the magical link between the mage and the demon would be as clear and as solid as a well-cobbled path. Magic could be sent along that path after them, a powerful spell to destroy them while they are incapacitated. 'Twould need be a mighty spell, but it _could_ be done."

"Is this true?" Rìona asked Wynne. The Circle mage frowned.

"Yes, that might work, if the abominations are victims of a willing possession. But it's still a foolish risk," Wynne said with a shake of her head. "You have no way of knowing which abominations were possessed by force or coercion, for a start. And what of those who are actually blood mages, siding with Uldred? They will hardly thank you once they are themselves again, or willingly fight for you."

Rìona's eyes hardened. "It is because of mages such as them that the rest are unjustly imprisoned without having ever comitted a crime," she said flatly. "They will fight for me, or face summary execution for what they have wrought here."

"There is another consideration," Wynne continued after a moment. "A desire abomination, perhaps, might have the intelligence and will to agree to such a thing, if you could trick it into doing so, but rage and hunger abominations would be violent. You could be badly injured or killed. As one of the two Grey Wardens remaining in Ferelden, you cannot take such a chance with yourself."

"Even if..." Alistair hesitated, then set his jaw and plunged ahead. "Even if _you_ survived, what of your... your babe?"

"You are with child?" Wynne asked sharply, and Rìona nodded, glowering at Alistair who returned the look with one of stubborn resolution. Wynne turned to Morrigan in outrage. "If the abominations became violent, the Warden could miscarry, at the very least!"

"The Warden and I have discussed the conflict her decision to carry her child will create with her duties to end the Blight," Morrigan replied dispassionately. "'Tis her choice, of course, whether she wishes to be nothing more than a coddled breeding mare or a Grey Warden."

Rìona sat down weakly and Leliana took up a nearly defensive stance at her shoulder, as though she would act as Rìona's bodyguard should any of their companions press her. Rìona stared at the floor, mulling her choices, then finally asked Wynne, "Do you know any offensive spells, such as Morrigan describes? Something powerful which could be sent into the Fade after the demons to destroy them once we have driven them out of the mages?"

"I know one, though it's more effective against a target which has been frozen or petrified," Wynne said grimly.

"I have one such spell, if we cannot find another mage for it," Morrigan offered. "Once the rite is concluded and the Veil opened, I would be free to cast. Since it will not be myself generating the energy which would power the ritual, I would have sufficient mana remaining once the rite is done."

"Tell me you're not seriously considering this," Alistair pleaded.

"What else can I do?" Rìona asked desperately. "We cannot continue to slay the very army we're meant to be gathering. You said it yourself, the mages are a much stronger offensive force than the templars. We need them."

"Yes, but—"

Rìona shook her head emphatically. "I cannot base my decisions upon the fact that I am with child," she said firmly. "I knew my decision not to rid myself of this babe was a risky one that would create hardships down the line. I could do nothing else, because this child is the last of two great and ancient bloodlines. I will preserve it if I can and carry it to birthing, by the Maker's mercy. But I will not allow it to prevent me doing my duty as a Grey Warden, even if that means losing the babe. Do you understand?"

Unhappily, Alistair nodded.

"It would be a waste of resources to slay these mages if they can yet be used," Sten interjected. "Such is the Warden's strength and purpose, to use her foes' desires against them."

Surprised by his approbation, Rìona glanced at Sten. He returned her look sternly and rumbled, "I also recommend properly leashing your mages in the future," and walked away as Rìona scowled.

"Then it's decided," Rìona said softly, her tone resigned. "If I can find an abomination with whom I can negotiate, I shall attempt to lure them into performing Morrigan's sex rite with me."

"Just like that?" Alistair asked unhappily, squatting in front of her to look her in the eyes. "How exactly are you intending to proposition an abomination?"

"I don't know." She shook her head, though an idea was already starting to form. "I'll think of something. It's what I do, after all, isn't it?"

"Please don't do this," he whispered, looking as though he was near tears. Rìona glanced away.

"What do you imagine Duncan would have done, in this situation?" she said after a moment. "Would he have slain the stronger fighting force in favor of the weaker? Or would he have done whatever was necessary to salvage the mages and secure their aid?"

"I don't know. He often said that the Grey Wardens do whatever it takes, but I don't think he would ever have imagined this. I don't think he'd risk a Grey Warden for it."

"Is my life somehow worth more than those of the mages we might save?" Rìona queried, arching a brow at him.

Alistair shrugged helplessly, his distress apparent as he rubbed the rune-marked ring on his left hand with his thumb. "The Blight can be defeated without them. It can't without you."

Rìona's eyes hardened. "And that's precisely why I must do this," she said. "I appreciate that you cared for Duncan, Alistair, but he was a ruthless man. Kind at times, yes, and dedicated..."

"I thought you said he was a friend to your family!" Alistair protested.

"And so he was, at least until the very end. But he was willing to sacrifice anything and anyone for his cause. He _used_ people, and I won't be like him. If we have to live in a world where each life is given a quantifiable value, I'm not certain it's even worth saving it from the Blight."

"Maybe," he grated, clearly displeased with her criticism of Duncan. "But that's not what this is about! You admitted that much before."

"Yes, I did," Rìona sighed. "Forget the dreams of the archdemon. If I don't do everything within my power to save these mages, every night for the rest of my life, each abomination we have slain here will wear Aodhán's face. Now, if you'll excuse me, I need some privacy."

She shooed them out of the strange partitioned chamber which hosted a variety of sleeping nooks, offering the templars within only partial privacy, and began to dig through armoires and vanities until she found what she needed.

Oil. The most valuable tool in a whore's complement, for minimizing discomfort in the absence of desire. She prepared herself mechanically, unthinkingly, barely aware of the touch of her own fingers spreading the oil over her folds and within her front and nether entrances.

This was not, _could not ever be_, about pleasure.

She'd been taught how to find passion in any situation, desire for any partner, no matter how unlikely or unlovely. It was as much a part of her art as her skill at giving pleasure. Now, she did the opposite. She made herself numb and empty, shutting away that part of her that could be roused so readily to desire. In doing so, she closed herself off to the horror, disgust and despair she felt at the prospect of what she had proposed to do. If she let herself think about it, let herself feel it, she would surely run mad.

Among the belongings of the dead templars, she found a padded gambeson that would not be so huge on her that it would encumber her ability to use her bow. She removed her precious leathers and donned that instead. It would not offer quite as much by way of protection, but it would be easy to remove if necessary and would spare her irreplaceable armor should matters become violent.

When she emerged, her party and Wynne hovered restlessly about in the corridor and Morrigan approached her, clearly annoyed.

"You may wish to have a discussion with that fool templar and the bard," the witch said huffily. "They are already plotting their strategies for attacking should any of the abominations handle you roughly. You, of all people, can surely recognize that for some, a bit of brutality spices the dish. If they interrupt precipitously, this will all be for naught."

Rìona nodded and looked at Alistair and Leliana, who were watching her expectantly, with Sten and Wynne behind them, barely less attentive. "There is a difference between pain and injury," she stated, her voice sounding to her own ears as though it belonged to someone else entirely. "If it heightens the abomination's desire, I can sustain some discomfort and even pain. Certainly I have no expectation of pleasure from this event; if I am distressed, hopefully that will be all the more pleasing for... it. If this... utterly _mad_ scheme seems to be working, do not interrupt unless I am in genuine danger of being harmed."

She gestured to Alistair and he took his customary position at point, the better to intercept any creatures they should encounter. Mindful of her lack of armor, Rìona remained even farther to the back than usual, falling into stride with Wynne.

"Are you certain about this plan, Warden?" asked the Circle mage.

"Not in the slightest."

"One wonders if your companion Morrigan actually wishes you to be harmed, for I can see no other purpose to this," Wynne muttered. "The mages who have become these abominations... they were my friends and comrades, in some way even my family. But even I would not have thought to ask you to go so far, and at such a potential personal cost, for them."

"You didn't ask," Rìona said shortly. "I do this for my own reasons."

Wynne nodded. "Whatever those reasons may be, Warden, you have my gratitude." 

* * *

In the end, it was almost ridiculously simple to put her plan into action.

They found the remainder of the surviving mages—both those who had been possessed and those last few still resisting—at the very top of the tower, in the Harrowing chamber. They were being tortured by Uldred and several other abominations. Tortured, and their minds manipulated and warped, until they succumbed and agreed to be possessed. Before her eyes, she saw a mage yield, saw the monstrous transformation that turned the man into a... creature.

Uldred, at least, still appeared human, but he was surrounded by a trio of abominations. These abominations, she surmised, must be trusted lieutenants. Only one attempted to attack immediately and it stopped at a gesture from Uldred. As for the remainder, they stood watchfully and the gleam of intelligence shone in their eyes. Sloth demons, then, at the very least. More likely desire.

And Uldred himself, she knew, was pride. It was apparent in every sneering word, every arrogant gesture and disdainful dismissal as he taunted Rìona and Wynne. Pride, the most clever and avaricious and powerful of all demons.

To appeal to him would require more than simple lust or pleasure, but it was Uldred himself who gave her the opportunity to trawl her bait before him.

"I could give you this gift, Wynne," he cajoled, "You and all your mages. It would be so much easier if you just accepted. But some people can be so stubborn."

Rìona stepped forward, standing beside the mage. She let her tone match his own, dripping with arrogant certitude. "It is not stubbornness that prevents them joining you, Uldred, or whatever you have become. They merely understand that I offer them something better."

"Don't be ridiculous!" he jeered. "Nothing can possibly compare with the power of the demon. When you and these remaining fools have finally yielded, we shall be enough to overpower the templars."

"You're really rather dim, aren't you?" Rìona mocked, and the pride abomination drew back as though stung, actually hissing at her. "What do you think awaits them if they should win their way past the templars and make their way out into the world? They may sow death and destruction for a while, but the oncoming Blight to the south will leave them little to play with in short order, and to the north and west lay more lands with armies of templars waiting to end them. What I offer them is considerably more."

"And what is that?"

"Power. Nearly limitless power," she taunted. "Can you offer them such a thing, without requiring blood to earn them the fear and enmity of all they encounter, or a monstrous transformation to forever brand them as a thing to be hunted and slain? Power that requires no lyrium to keep them shackled to the Chantry or illegal lyrium traffickers. Power so subtle and freely available that the Chantry has been waging a quiet, futile war upon it for ages because they know they cannot eradicate it completely?"

Behind her, she heard Alistair draw a sharp, surprised breath. He hadn't made the connection, then, between the Chantry's doctrinal struggles with the free exercise of pleasure and the fact that magical energy could be derived from sex.

"You lie!" Uldred said dismissively. "If such power existed, I would know of it."

"Would you, indeed? If _you_ cannot sense it on me, then perhaps you're not so powerful as you think." Rìona arched an eyebrow in challenge, nodding at the desire abominations. "Your minions there know what it is. They wield it every day, so deftly that you never realized that they are actually more powerful than yourself."

Again, he made an angry hissing sound, and Rìona allowed herself a small smirk. He was pride, and that was his weakness as well as his power. Each time she mocked him, each time she flaunted her power, it would serve to make him long to see her humbled.

Uldred drew near, pressing his face close to hers. He breathed in deeply, smelling her. "Yes. You _have_ been touched by powerful magic. And yet, I don't detect enough lyrium in you to account for it, nor enough bloodletting," he eyes narrowed, and his voice lowered, his tone purring. "Whatever have you been meddling with, girl?"

"You'll find out soon enough, when I use it to defeat you."

Uldred laughed. "Defeat me? I could destroy you this very instant if I desired. Tell me now, or I will do so."

"Destroy me and you'll never know what it is."

"Very well, then, I shall simply possess your mind instead."

"I think not," Rìona tutted. "I have read the Litany of Adralla."

"You will tell me what this power is, or I will kill these pathetic wretches right now," he screamed, gesturing at Irving and the few remaining mages.

"Why does it matter to you?" Rìona asked archly. "You seemed so very confident a moment ago that you had all the power you needed."

"With this new magic of yours in addition to what we already possess, we will be unstoppable!" Uldred declared. "You _will_ tell me!"

Rìona paused, pretending to ponder her options as her thoughts churned frantically, seeing a chance to escape this situation without submitting to the end to which she had resigned herself. There was an opportunity here to win the freedom of the remaining unconverted mages, at the very least. It would not save the mages who were now abominations, but they were only three, not including Uldred who could not be saved in any event. Maker help her, but three she could sacrifice, if it meant sparing herself the ordeal of lying with demons.

"Let the remaining mages go," she said finally, "and I will tell you."

"You wish to _bargain_ with me?"

"Perhaps. Or perhaps I'm just stalling, trying to bide my time until Greagoir and the templars charge in here with the Writ of Annulment in hand." She smiled sweetly. "I'm not the only one in a difficult position, you see. Unless you can complete your work and get out of here shortly, an army of templars will come sweeping in and destroy everything that moves."

Uldred glared at her, his face suffused with rage. Rìona returned his look with bland complaisance.

"Very well," he said shortly. "They can leave... _except_ Irving. I nearly have him swayed to my side, you see. With your magic, I should have no problem convincing him to join us."

Rìona's heart sank. Above all, she needed Irving, or it would be for naught. Without him, the mages would die when the templars swept the tower.

There was no help for it, then. She had not come this far to lose the mages to the templars. She _must_ win Irving's release, whatever the cost.

She nodded once, grimly, and the handful of mages bound beside Irving suddenly sagged as their bonds disappeared.

"Wynne," Rìona instructed, catching the Circle mage's eye and giving her an intent look. This development may have been an improvisation, not part of their plan, but it could be used to their advantage, if only Wynne could pick up on her cues. There was still Uldred to be fought, after all. "Escort them to the door."

Wynne acknowledged the command with a nod and, murmuring to the others, urged them to their feet and toward the door. Then Rìona turned to face Uldred again.

"Now you will tell me what I want to know," he commanded.

"Very well," she said, allowing herself a triumphant smile. "You were a fool to agree to my bargain, for it can avail you nothing. The apostate there knows a ritual to harness magical power from sexual energy. Anyone participating in the sex act gains the power once it is unleashed. There. Now you know my secret." Rìona laughed, as though enjoying a cruel joke. "But it's useless to you. You don't know the ritual, and even if you did, I find the notion of _you_ acquiring a willing partner... highly unlikely."

"_You_ will perform the ritual with me!" Uldred growled in frustration.

No. That was not acceptable. Lying with him would accomplish nothing, for he was possessed by force and could not be freed. It must be the other abominations, the monstrosities, with whom she performed the ritual.

"You can't honestly begin to think I'd stoop to lie with _you_, pathetic weasel that you are!"

"I am not the only one who will be ended when the templars arrive!" the abomination screamed in fury. "They will not take time to differentiate the innocents from those possessed by demons! Your only hope of getting out of here alive now rests in helping us get out as well."

Rìona cursed and spun away from him, pacing as though agitated. She could feel the eyes of her companions upon her, carefully impassive lest they give away the game, leaving the theatrics up to her. And still she felt nothing, not even glee that her ruse seemed to be working so well. She could not allow herself to feel, or she'd no doubt begin screaming in horror.

She sighed as though in resignation, her shoulders dropping, and Uldred smiled in satisfaction. Was there desire in that smile? Yes, she rather thought there was. He liked thinking he had outwitted her, defeated her.

"So be it," she assented.

Uldred chuckled, a horrid sound that was meant to taunt and humiliate. "If you find me so very repugnant, perhaps you will be more pleased to entertain my minions," he said smugly, gesturing to the deformed monstrosities that waited on his command.

They surrounded her, their skin carved in runnels like melted wax, colored the mottled brownish-purple of putrefying flesh. The aggressive one—she thought it might be a rage abomination—charged for Rìona and she heard Leliana's bowstring creak as Alistair and Sten's swords cleared their sheaths.

"If your pets injure me, they die," Rìona said, gritting her teeth as the monstrosity began shredding the gambeson she had donned. Its claws ripped through the linen of her shirt to score her skin, drawing blood. Uldred laughed again, his eyes gleaming eagerly.

"Oh, but blood is a part of our power," Uldred pouted. "See how it arouses him, to see you bleed?" The abomination parted the tatters of the robe it had once worn as a mage, the cloth stiff with dried blood and ichor, to reveal a turgid phallus the same putrid shade of the rest of its flesh. "Alas, it may be the only thing to arouse him. So you shall simply have to bleed. Don't injure her too badly; she still has yet to prove her claims," he cautioned, and the creature let out a sound that may have been frustration, and resumed ripping her garments from her body.

"Pleasure him," Uldred commanded, and Rìona closed her eyes and willed her mind to stillness. Nothing could touch her. She repeated the thought like its own litany. No pain. No fear. No revulsion. No desire. Empty. She would be empty, emotionless, like the Tranquil she had met.

She reached for the phallus before her, and sank to her knees. Behind her, Morrigan began to drone a chant.

She would not think of what was in her mouth, nor of the destructive power of those hands that continued to bruise and slice her skin until she whimpered in pain. The phallus hardened further when she did so, responding to her suffering. She would not think of the hands of the other abominations, removing the remainder of her clothing much more deliberately that the first had done. Indeed, thinking of them would be even worse, for they were—Maker, were they trying to _caress_ her?

Yes. Sweet Andraste's mercy, she hadn't counted upon that. Desire abominations. She should have suspected. She shut her mind off to it, would not let herself feel it, those mottled, strange hands trying to arouse her...

Uldred laughed when the creature thrust too hard, making her gag and choke. "Not so arrogant now, are you?" he mocked, and his smooth, nasal voice had a rough edge to it. He was affected. "There on your knees with a demon's cock in your mouth."

Hands, their texture strange and wrong, all over her body. Hands ripping at her skin, covering her breasts and kneading, insinuating themselves between her thighs. A finger worked its way inside her and Rìona squeezed her eyes more tightly shut, attempting to drown out that taunting laughter and those monstrous fingers that felt so very _wrong_.

"This isn't working." Morrigan's sharp voice broke through the emptiness. "_That_ one needs violence and suffering to be moved to passion, and you are giving it none. Those two have passion aplenty to offer, but you are not allowing it. And the one who talks too much will not be roused until you are completely subjugated. You must do better."

Morrigan gave her a stern glare and resumed chanting. She heard a concerned murmur from her companions accompanied by a wave of despair. This wasn't going to work; she'd been a fool to even think it.

The two that had been caressing her withdrew, and she felt something _shift_. Leliana gasped and Alistair made a choked sound of surprise. She drew away from the abomination she was pleasuring and looked to either side of her and froze.

Gone were the mottled, deformed creatures that had been touching her. They had taken on the shape of their demon selves, instead. One was identical to the desire demons she had seen elsewhere; seducing the templars, or inhabiting the Fade. Feminine and radiating unabashed sensuality. High, firm breasts rose above a pleasingly tapered waist and slightly concave belly, which then flared out into full, round hips and a beautifully contoured backside. The other was similar but unmistakably masculine, covered in rippling muscles rather than soft, lush curves. Evidence of an erection strained against the drape it wore over its loins, and from the feminine demon came the powerful scent of musk, familiar and yet somehow wrong.

They reached for her, and Rìona shrank back. She had girded herself against horror and revulsion, not beauty. They were demons; she _could not_ rouse to them, not if she wished to keep her sanity intact.

Urgently, she again sought that blank, empty place, that place of nothingness, where no hands could touch her, no lips or skin could move her.

"If she resists, kill her and the others," Uldred demanded. The abomination growled and seized Rìona by the hair, dragging her forward again. She cried out in pain as hair was ripped from her scalp and the abomination made a pleased sound. As she had with Morrigan in Redcliffe, Rìona felt something spark, felt the power of its arousal begin to build, felt the connection of lust form between them, a living, intangible tendril that was weak and sickly at her end.

Maker help her, Morrigan was right. She needed to please them and she could not do that shut off to them, refusing to let herself experience what they were doing.

The despair of failure was strong within her, for she knew this could be nothing else now. She could not yield to them, could not let them touch the part of herself that knew fear and arousal. It would break her to do it. The most she could hope for now was to try to distract them so that her party and the freed mages could mount some sort of offense, to kill them and free Irving.

The hands on her breasts and sex no longer felt alien and wrong. Indeed, they felt far too right, far too human. The desire abominations embraced her, kissing the wounds that had been scored by the rage abomination's claws, licking the blood from them. Lips sealed over her nipples, one set firm and the other soft, while a puce-colored phallus thrust insistently toward her again. Bleakly, Rìona opened to it, praying for the Maker's mercy, for some moment of grace that would let her see a way out of this situation.

The desire abominations were skilled, there was no mistake about that. They touched her with an expertise that would have made the finest courtesans of Antiva weep with envy. Her own talents were nothing to it. And yet she could find no pleasure in it. Not in the perversion of the situation, nor in the pain of the rage abomination's brutal grasp, nor in the humiliation of Uldred's taunts. All these things she could transform to passion if she willed it, but she could not.

Displeased with her lack of response, they redoubled her efforts. The feminine one worked its strange, scalpless head between her thighs, its tongue stroking and probing, while the masculine one pressed against her from behind, embracing her as a lover would, pressing intimately close. Its hands kneaded her breasts, fingers plucking expertly at her nipples as it stroked what felt to be a long, elegantly shaped phallus along the cleft of her backside. She could feel cool breath and a hot tongue on her folds, but it did nothing to move her. She felt the chilly trail of moisture left behind by the strokes that ended at the small of her back, felt the flex and shift of the muscles in the arms that held her, and yet it was as though someone else's body was being embraced, being touched with such consummate skill.

The one pleasuring her with its mouth changed, its lithe, feminine body filling out and becoming masculine. And when that failed, they both transformed into feminine demons. Still nothing. Masculine or feminine, or one of each, still their touches left her with naught but bleak emptiness.

A tear slipped from her eye, a sign of the grief and sorrow and defeat she could not let herself feel. Uldred cackled madly to see it.

"So much more appealing now, when you're humble," he observed, drawing nearer. Andraste have mercy, there was desire in his tone, slithering over her skin like rancid grease. "This is nice," he purred, seizing her hair to jerk her head back, flexing her neck so that she strained to look up into his demon-crazed eyes. It caused her discomfort and that pleased the rage abomination. Its phallus bobbed before her face, wet with her saliva. "I forget that there are some advantages to humanity. You're so very charming when you're broken."

His hand clamped upon her breast, brutally hard, bruising. Rìona screamed and the tendril of power between her and the rage abomination flared brighter.

"But where is this power you boasted of?" Uldred demanded, his fingernails digging in cruelly. "Did you lie to trick me into releasing the mages? You'll have to be punished for that. If I find you've misled me, you'll suffer beyond measure before you die."

"Please. It was no lie!" she gasped, her neck aching with the brutal angle at which he held her head. A lump showed beneath his robes at her helplessness, her humility. She felt a hint of the delicate strand of desire that wound between her and the rage abomination flare between her and Uldred and realized that while the demon possessing him could not be sent back to the Fade, its power could still be used in the ritual. It would distract him, giving them room to launch an attack before he realized what was happening to his minions. But it was still only a hint of the power which was needed, nothing compared to that which she had generated with Morrigan.

"By Flemeth's beard!" Morrigan spat in disgust, and beyond the witch, Rìona heard Alistair and Leliana murmuring urgently to one another. "Is it your will to do this thing or not, Warden? If you will not surrender to pleasure, it cannot be done!"

Rìona closed her eyes, blocking out Uldred's wizened face and mad eyes. Her mouth trembled as she struggled form the words that would spell her own death, to admit her failure. Hopefully her companions would be fast enough with their weapons to save themselves, and Irving, once she confessed that she could not do it. This close, this vulnerable to the abominations, she knew she would not survive the initial attack.

"Is this true?" Uldred demanded, his voice growing harsh and furious. The desire demons began to draw away from her and the rage abomination stirred excitedly to hear it, for it portended bloodshed and destruction.

Her eyes still tightly shut, Rìona opened her mouth to speak, only to start at the touch of warm, masculine fingers upon her face, covering her lips and stilling her words. The fingertips were callused and smelled simply of leather and iron, rather than the subliminal, nape-ruffling wrongness of the demons. That scent was at once utterly unfamiliar and yet strangely right.

An instant later, a stubbled chin brushed her face and pliant, inexperienced lips sought hers. Rìona gave a startled whimper against that hesitant, inviting mouth.

_Alistair!_

There was no art in that kiss, no expertise. He was shaking so hard Rìona thought he might quake apart. Her arms snapped around him and clutched fiercely, her lips yielding to his. His hands came up and cupped her face as he drank at her mouth and her lips opened, her tongue flicking at him. One hand slid down her neck to softly stroke the tendon where it joined her shoulder, while the fingers on one side delicately traced the shell of her ear, and Rìona recalled her words to him in the Fade.

When his tongue stretched out to meet hers—tentatively, oh, so carefully!—Rìona felt it to the very ends of her extremities. Her fingers splayed across his back, digging into the planes of muscle beneath his shoulders. He'd taken off his cuirass, his padded gambeson and the linen shirt beneath. His flesh was bare and warm beneath her hands, and she clung to him desperately, as though she were drowning and he the only thing keeping her afloat. She felt a complex weave of desire flaring to life between the abominations and herself, and between herself and Alistair.

The abominations, sensing the shift, the raw potential power, pressed in closer. With a mighty shudder, Rìona opened herself to desire. Fear, horror, revulsion, humiliation all spilled over her alongside it, threatening to suck her under into madness. She gripped Alistair tighter, allowing her hands to delight in the feel of his muscles beneath her fingers as she devoured his mouth. With that delight, a surge of cramping arousal pulsed in her sex, the tension of desire building deep in her belly. As revolting as the desire abomination's hand between her thighs was, she now felt pleasure as it stroked skillfully over her pearl, making her body clench in an excess of sensation. When hot, delicate fingers slid into her body, she was slick with more than the oil she had used, and responded with a moan of pleasure.

And then she was being pulled away, and Alistair roughly elbowed aside. Rìona let out a cry of protest, but the abominations were unrelenting. Uldred gripped her face and hair, forcing her mouth back upon the phallus of the rage abomination in its hideous, deformed state.

"Now you feel the power _we_ wield, don't you?" he boasted beside her ear, his voice filled with arrogance and the sure knowledge of his own superiority. The tendril of passion between the two of them flared brighter, for this was the source of his pleasure, his desire. He thought her humbled, thought he had broken her will to resist. But he lied, and she knew it. This was her power, which they merely touched and fed. They were not capable of generating this, even the desire abominations.

A muscled body pressed against her back as one of those two knelt behind her, its phallus prodding insistently at her folds. Rìona lifted her hips and shuddered with mingled revulsion and ecstasy as it filled her.

_It._ She was being fucked by a demon, pleasuring a monster. Madness threatened to drag her under once more as the thought crept inexorably into her mind. Desperately, she reached out a hand, blindly grasping, and Alistair took it within his. She laced her fingers through his own and squeezed so tightly she felt the bones shift and the knuckles crack. She held on as though her very sanity depending on that link—which it did.

Uldred made a sound of pleasure as she gagged again, reflexive tears springing to her eyes. Her other hand was seized and drawn between a pair of thighs. Rìona sensed weakness there, in the thread of desire between herself and this other desire abomination. Resolutely, she began to stroke, to pleasure that feminine form with as much skill as she could muster amidst the distractions. This one's power was desire, and it roused easily, shifting sinuously where it lay on the blood-splattered floor of the Harrowing chamber, seeking more of Rìona's touch.

Rìona moaned as the abomination within her thrust harder, skillfully finding the angle which brought her the most pleasure, and on the next thrust she shuddered with release. With the floodgates of awareness opened, it was impossible not to respond to the pleasure it wielded so deftly.

Brighter, ever brighter the mounting power burned, until Rìona was certain she would be consumed by it. Uldred gave an exultant laugh and shoved the rage abomination aside just as it quivered on the brink of release. The desire abomination coupling with her was likewise pushed away, and Rìona's hand jerked from Alistair's grasp, a fact which made her wail in dismay.

"Now you will pleasure me," he commanded, spilling her onto her back on the floor and thrusting between her thighs quickly. His robes stroked across her skin; he'd not bothered to undress. Astonishingly, his entry brought another climax, Rìona moaning and writhing beneath him, even as she clenched her eyes shut to avoid seeing that mad but too-human face above her.

Uldred set a swift, demanding pace, thrusting into her as fast and carelessly as a man would his own hand while pleasuring himself. Lips closed over her nipple from the sensuous mouth of one of the desire abominations—the feminine one—and the other, left with no activity, took over where Rìona had left off with the rage abomination, keeping that flow of desire alive between all of them.

The power mounted. And mounted. Distantly Rìona realized the masculine desire abomination was fucking the feminine one, who yet continued to lave attention upon Rìona's breasts. Once again, that undercurrent of insanity began to creep in, threatening to sweep her away into madness, and once again she reached out. Alistair caught her hand and anchored her. She could feel his own trembling and wondered if it was desire or revulsion, or if he felt the power that kept building with his templar-honed senses.

The rage abomination roared its release, and Rìona felt the surge of it within that escalating spiral of power. It bent over her and tore into her shoulders with its claws, attempting to keep the desire flowing even as its release unleashed a cascade, an unstoppable avalanche of pleasure and power. The desire abominations fell to it, one after the other, and finally Uldred, going rigid and shuddering above her, and as he did so, Morrigan shouted the same word she'd spoken at Castle Redcliffe at the moment of her own release.

The Veil sundered.

Screams and roars filled the chamber as the abominations had an instant of dismay before their bodies were frozen, surrounded by a blue-white aura of magic as they were caught up in the pull of the Fade. All but Uldred, who reared back, Rìona's death written in his eyes as he comprehended what she had done. But then Leliana appeared behind him and the point of a dagger protruded from the front of his neck. He collapsed and Rìona struggled to be free of the dead weight of his body. Immediately, Alistair was there, pulling her away, surrounding her with his body to shield her from any harm.

The bodies of the abominations began to transform; the rage and desire abominations melting into two human mages and an elf, lying in that strange rictus of being caught in the waking dream of the Fade. Just as that fissure into the Fade began to wave unsteadily, ready to be sealed, a blast of force rushed past Rìona, blowing her sweat-drenched hair like a mighty wind. It was the power of stone and ice, and immediately following it was another blast. Lightning, earth, ice and fire; every conceivable element flowed through that connection between the waking world and the Fade to the demons there and shattered their frozen and petrified forms.

The Veil sealed shut and there was a terrible silence. Peering around Alistair, Rìona saw that Wynne had indeed taken her hint and kept the released mages close by, summoning them back into the Harrowing chamber once the abominations were distracted. They had each contributed their magic to ensure the destruction of those demons in the Fade, and now they stood staring at _her_ in bewilderment.

Rìona croaked a single word between dry lips. How Alistair understood it, she could not imagine, and yet he did, releasing her. Whether drained by the power of the ritual or the trauma of her ordeal, she was too weak to stand. Instead, she pulled away from his arms and crawled on hands and knees to Uldred's dead form and waited for the other former abominations to awaken.

She did not know how long it was, for she felt as though she was drifting in and out of reality. Long enough for Wynne to heal the gashes the rage abomination had scored in her flesh and for the blood to dry upon her skin. Long enough for her companions to help First Enchanter Irving to his feet and explain to him the deal she had made with Greagoir. Long enough for Uldred's seed between her thighs to become a tacky, uncomfortable mess. Eventually, though, the mages stirred.

They lay there stunned, and one by one their attention instinctively turned to her. When they were all awake, she yanked the dagger from Uldred's neck, as though it was she, and not Leliana, who had killed him, and brandished it at them.

They stared at her in terror. "I don't know which of you were willing accomplices to Uldred's schemes, or which of you were compelled against your wills. Andraste have mercy upon me, _I don't care_. I am the Grey Warden Rìona and I seek aid fighting the Blight. Just how much assistance the Tower can render shall be decided between Irving and myself, but as for you three, you _will_ come to aid me when I call for you, or you will die this very instant, here on this floor. Until I summon you, you will be imprisoned here in the Tower under First Enchanter Irving and Knight-Commander Greagoir's supervision, but you will not yet be made Tranquil. Once the archdemon is defeated and the Blight is over, you will return here to the Tower and submit yourselves to the justice of the templars. Serve me well and I will use all the influence at my disposal to seek clemency for your crimes. Am I understood?"

Only one of the mages protested, trying ineffectually to rise and summon power to cast a spell. He fell with one of Leliana's arrows through his heart.

A cloak was draped over her shoulders—Wynne, she thought, though her perceptions were growing increasingly dim—and with her last ounce of willpower, she met Irving's eyes. "First Enchanter, I beg you give me time to bathe and dress. I will meet you downstairs and then we will discuss the terms of how the Circle of Magi will fulfill its treaty obligations to the Grey Wardens."

She attempted to push herself to her feet, but the cloak felt like a leaden weight, dragging her down. She staggered beneath it, losing her footing, and as the world grew gray, Alistair's arms were there to catch her, and carry her from the chamber.

Her last conscious, but utterly irrational, thought before everything faded to darkness was that she had begun to fall in love.

_A/N: The idea for the male desire demon described in the chapter was inspired by DragonReine's brilliant and gorgeous bit of gender-swap art, What Is Your Desire?. She was kind enough to recreate that concept for me for this chapter's artwork as well._


	22. Chapter Twenty Two: Avoidance

"Alistair? You're staring."

"She's avoiding me."

"The Warden?" Leliana asked from beside him where he sat on a fallen log with a nearly untouched chunk of bread and salted venison in his lap. "Nonsense. She's just..."

"Avoiding me."

They were a day's travel south of Kinloch Hold on the shores of Lake Calenhad. Rìona intended to travel to Denerim along the North Road, along the way investigating the old Grey Warden stronghold of Soldier's Peak in an effort to secure more resources and fulfill a pledge Duncan had made to a trader by the name of Levi Dryden. But she first insisted that they seek out a spot where Sten had camped with the rest of his company in the Beresaad, in an effort to track down the sword he had lost when he had been attacked by darkspawn there.

Now she was deep in conference with Sten, comparing landmarks and trying to get more details of his memory of the area where the attack that had killed a whole company of qunari had taken place. She was looking at Sten, looking at hastily sketched maps, looking at trees and bushes and rocky outcroppings.

What she wasn't doing was looking at Alistair. She had been studiously _not_ doing that since he'd carried her out of the Harrowing chamber in the Circle Tower, unconscious and naked beneath a hastily donned cloak. Whether it had been the drain of the ritual she had performed with the abominations, or the injuries she had sustained in the process, or if she had simply been overwhelmed and exhausted, it had taken her over an hour to awaken after he had laid her upon the nearest bed that hadn't been overturned or destroyed. He'd hovered by her side the whole time as Wynne healed and fussed over her. When her eyes had opened, he'd been the first person they'd landed upon.

Something touched her face in that instant, something close to panic. Then her eyes had skittered away and they hadn't returned to him since.

"Do you think maybe she's angry with me?" he asked.

"Maker, no!" the bard protested. "Why on earth would she be angry?"

"Oh, I dunno. I did help her... help her... have sex. With demons." He cursed himself for blushing.

"What else could you have done?" Leliana asked simply, sitting beside him on the log. "She needed help, or the abominations would have attacked and killed her."

"Maybe it would have been better if we had just attacked instead. Why did I do it? Why _didn't_ we just attack? I could have killed Uldred. His attention was on her, not us. We could have cut them all down before they had a chance to respond."

"It would not have been so easy as that, I think," Leliana chided. "They were very powerful abominations, _non?_ She was naked and unarmed and surrounded by them. Even if you had slain Uldred, the others might have killed her before she could get away. Or they might have killed Irving, in which case we would all be dead and the mages destroyed."

She was right, and he knew it. But Alistair couldn't recall reasoning it out that far himself. All he could remember knowing in that moment was that if Rìona was desperate enough to subject herself to such a thing, to save the mages and prevent the templars from wiping out the Circle, he would do everything in his power to help her get it done.

And so, instead of fighting for her, he'd kissed her.

Maker, that kiss! It was nothing like what he'd imagined the first time he ever kissed a woman would be, and yet he could not get it out of his mind, nor the feel of her hands as she had clutched at his shoulders. It hadn't been desire which had made her cling to him like that, her fingers biting deep into his flesh, but desperation. In the end, though, desire had awoken, awoken in a way that made all his lofty notions of courtly romance seem trite and childish. What had happened in the Harrowing chamber hadn't been about a noble and shining love. It had been mad and dire and full of need, and it had shaken him to his very roots.

Shaken him, and made him long for more.

Alistair thought he knew yearning. In the monastery, the more the sisters who had ministered to the templar initiates and the brothers who trained them had talked about the inherent sinfulness of lust and the importance of refusing to yield to his desires, the more keenly aware he'd been of them. Sister Siobhan with her magnificent bosom that strained against the golden embroidery across the bodice of her robes. Sister Félicie from Orlais, whose generously rounded backside drew the eye of every initiate in attendance when she genuflected at the front of the sanctuary as they filed in to receive their daily blessing. Even Brother Ruarc, Alistair's sword master, as he rinsed the sweat off his muscled chest at the watering trough on a sweltering summer day, while simultaneously explaining that mages were a wanton lot who would try to seduce a templar into letting down his guard.

Alistair quickly learned to be thankful for the long scarlet bases of the armor the templar initiates wore. They hid a multitude of indiscreet moments when his body reacted in spite of his will, as he grew to manhood struggling against those impulses and keenly aware they could never have any outlet.

But over time, those impulses had stopped plaguing him.

It wasn't that he learned to quell them. Occasionally his body would still respond to something, but he could muster no interest in pursuing that reaction, past a halfhearted stroke or two. It was as though the desire to indulge his occasional urges just simply went away as he resigned himself to his fate. It just didn't seem worth the bother. Somewhere within, he instinctively knew that lack of interest to be _wrong_. He was _supposed_ to want to indulge those errant impulses. He was supposed to care. But what would the point of caring about what he was missing have been, anyway, except to eventually drive him mad?

It wasn't only interest in his... urges... he lost. It was much the same with food; his stomach would rumble, but he was utterly uninterested in satisfying it. He just... quit caring. He'd avoid eating until he was shaking with hunger, and then he ate the bare minimum to keep functioning. He must have lost close to two stone that last year before Duncan had conscripted him.

He'd quit caring about his perpetually virginal fate, quit caring about a future of servitude and eventual lyrium-induced madness, quit caring about sleep, even. He spent his nights tossing in his bunk, his mind churning about everything and nothing. He would wake in the small hours of the morning and find himself unable to get back to sleep, unable to stop mulling over the hopelessness and futility of the situation.

As the months passed and his confirmation drew ever nearer, he'd found himself prone to sudden and inexplicable bursts of rage far out of proportion with the provocation. He nearly broke one templar initiate's jaw in a fight over something he couldn't even remember now. The frequency of the times the Revered Mother had to assign him disciplinary tasks doubled, then trebled.

And then everything had changed.

It had been a strange adaptation, joining the Grey Wardens. As the weeks drew out and he realized that he was truly free of the Chantry, his appetite improved and his sleep was no longer disrupted the way it had been, save for dreams of the archdemon. His temper took a remarkable turn for the better as well. He'd thought he was back to normal, or as close to normal as he'd ever been. Reconnecting with his... _impulses_... had been harder, though. It was as though, once dormant, it was easier to let them remain so than allow them to reawaken and trouble him.

The other Grey Wardens had been kind to Alistair, but he'd taken a lot of ribbing for having been a "Chantry boy." After he survived his Joining, several of his brothers had offered to take him out to a brothel and buy him a woman in celebration. None of them had been more surprised than Alistair himself when he'd demonstrated no enthusiasm for the plan, and once again he was struck by that instinctive sense of wrongness. Still, when one of them kindly offered to buy him a man instead, Alistair had quickly scrambled to tell them he was waiting for something more meaningful. That had earned him a good deal of ribbing as well, but the Grey Wardens had respected it enough to not offer again.

Eventually, that explanation started to make sense to Alistair. It wasn't that he didn't _want_ sex, it was simply that he wanted it to be with someone he cared about. The excuse served him in good stead when Rìona had unexpectedly invited him to her tent—which had, to tell the truth, been the first time he'd felt any actual interest in such a proposition in probably two years or more.

That invitation had been like the first fissure in a dam. Then he'd seen her dancing, seen her in the stables in Redcliffe with Bella and some other man. Another fissure. Then the next day, with Morrigan in the main hall of Castle Redcliffe, another. Soon, they were forming a crisscross cobweb of fault-lines through his lack of interest. It got worse still during his conversation with Rìona in the Fade, when she had talked to him about learning to pleasure himself. He hadn't told her that part of what had made that nightmare so distressing was the fact that all that arousal he had stopped feeling as he resigned himself to becoming a templar had come flooding back. It had been so powerful it had incapacitated him, as the sisters and brothers of the monastery had warned him it would do.

Suddenly his disinterest was melting away, and that was terrifying.

And then there had been the Harrowing chamber, and that kiss and her hands upon his bare skin. It was then Alistair had realized that what he thought he knew of yearning was nothing. Nothing at all.

If Rìona were to come to him now and invite him to her tent again, he knew he would not refuse. He was waiting for her to do just that, fearful but still longing for it, because he _knew_ she had felt the same things he had in the Harrowing chamber. He was absolutely certain of it. But she wasn't coming to him.

Instead, she was avoiding him.

"Alistair?"

"Sorry," he said sheepishly. "I got distracted."

"I can tell," the bard replied with a smug smile. "It was very romantic, what you did for her, yes?"

"What? No! No. It wasn't. It was... not. That."

_But it was,_ his mind whispered traitorously, and he glowered at Leliana.

"That's not what it was about," he said sternly. "Don't be so blasted Orlesian about it."

"It's all right to care for her, Alistair," Leliana said, frowning, confused by his denial. For that matter, so was he.

"Maybe you missed the part where _she's avoiding me._"

"So seek her out!" she replied in exasperation. "You have two feet, yes? Why must you wait for her to come to you?"

"And what would I say?" he demanded, tugging on his braided queue. "'You know, I actually enjoyed that little canoodle we had atop the tower surrounded by the demons. Maybe we should try it again sometime!' I'm sure that'll go over brilliantly."

"Is that worse than sitting here fretting that she's avoiding you?"

"Um... yes?" Irritated, he asked, "What about you? I got the impression that you rather liked her yourself."

"I do," answered the bard with a casual shrug.

"Then why are you trying to push me at her? She seems to like women well enough, after all."

"Because I'm not the one who knew what she needed atop the tower," Leliana answered simply and stood to leave. "Talk to her. Perhaps it is not that she is avoiding you so much as she simply doesn't know what to say."

Talk to her. Right.

For some reason, that plan just seemed to rank right up there alongside 'Hey, let's trust Teyrn Loghain to flank the darkspawn horde and save the king!' in brilliance. 

* * *

The next day, they were attacked by assassins.

They had just turned north, having successfully located someone who had information pertaining to Sten's sword, when they walked straight into an ambush. How the assassins knew where to locate them in order to set the trap was a bit of a mystery, but it was a long, grueling fight before all but one of the attackers lay dead.

By all rights, the elf who lead the attack should have been dead as well. He had been the first one Sten had charged. But while Alistair had been dealing with a mage who was among the attackers, Rìona had shouted to Sten that they needed the elf alive, and so the qunari had bashed him in the head with the hilt of his broadsword rather than decapitated him.

Rìona took an arrow through her shoulder from one of the archers lining the narrow canyon in which the ambush had been laid, and Leliana and Sten had both been wounded as well. Alistair himself had been injured also, when one of the mage assassin's spells had sent him flying back and slammed him into a boulder so hard he cracked some ribs.

Wynne had her hands full after the fight was over, while they waited for the elf to regain consciousness, and her mana was depleted. While she tended to Sten and Leliana, Morrigan—who lacked any ability with healing spells—removed the arrow from Rìona's shoulder and rinsed the wound with spirits, then bound it with linen strips. Wynne was using what little mana she had regained to heal Alistair's ribs when Morrigan approached Rìona with a wooden cup.

"'Tis a healing draught," the witch explained, offering it. "'Twill help with the pain and prevent the wound from festering."

Wynne, overhearing, frowned and intercepted the cup as Rìona reached for it. The older mage brought it to her nose and pulled a face as she sniffed. "Rashvine nettle? Blood lotus? Nonsense! This is no proper healing potion. Whatever skills at herbalism you managed to acquire in the Korcari Wilds, Morrigan, they're sadly lacking."

"'Tis an ancient formula taught to me by Flemeth, who healed the Warden well enough after Ostagar." Morrigan sneered, reaching for the cup. "'Tis possible in your limited experience within the Circle Tower, you've failed to study the restorative properties of the rarer herbs."

"I've studied enough to know those particular plants are nothing to trifle with," Wynne retorted, evading Morrigan's reach and flinging the contents of the cup onto the ground where they steamed in the cold air for a moment. "Blood lotus is an effective purgative but useful for very little else. If you would like to learn some proper draughts, I will be happy to teach you. Otherwise, I suggest leaving the potion-making to me, unless your intention is to give the Warden a debilitating case of the flux."

Furious, Morrigan stormed away, leaving Rìona staring after her with a troubled frown. It was on the tip of Alistair's tongue to crack a joke about the possibility that Morrigan actually was trying to poison them when the assassin at their feet stirred, and they had more important things to worry about.

The elf's name was Zevran, and he was a member of the Antivan Crows, who would henceforth be seeking to kill him for failing to fulfill his contract. Or so he claimed. He _also_ claimed that he'd been hired by none other than Teyrn Loghain to kill the remaining Grey Wardens in Ferelden. That, Alistair found easier to believe, though it did little to alleviate his misgivings about Rìona's decision to keep the assassin around when Zevran offered her his oath of loyalty in exchange for protection from the Crows.

The assassin's presence gave Rìona the perfect opportunity to continue avoiding him and, despite Leliana's reassurances, that was precisely what Alistair knew she was doing. She now spent her evenings in camp in conversation with the Antivan, when she wasn't talking with Wynne. She still made certain to check in with each of their other companions at night as well, which had been her habit since Lothering. As she had explained to Alistair, without a proper military structure, or any genuine claim to their companions' allegiance besides a simple willingness on their part to follow, it behooved her to generate as much goodwill within their party as possible.

But with Zevran, Alistair feared it was something more. The assassin made no effort to conceal his flirtations, and Rìona seemed to be making no effort to deflect them. Alistair might have wondered what the attraction was, if he didn't already know.

They were alike. Alike in a way that Alistair and Rìona never would be. Zevran used his sexual appeal to his advantage, to distract and disarm his marks, and that was something to which Rìona could relate. Assuming the Antivan's oath was sincere and he wasn't simply biding his time waiting for an opportunity to slip a dagger between her ribs, he would never question or judge her approach to things as Alistair had done.

Zevran was her male counterpart.

It got worse as they reached the north road and continued east, veering north into the coastal mountain range once they passed Highever to the location to which Levi Dryden had directed them. It quickly became apparent that they were not really equipped for winter weather in the mountains and Alistair could see Rìona's disgust with herself for not having considered such a possibility.

"Maker's balls!" she muttered as Wynne inspected her hands for signs of frostbite. "Eighteen years spent nestled in the foothills of these mountains and I lead my party into them as carelessly as if I'd never been south of Tevinter!"

Fortunately, they had met with Levi Dryden and made their way into the network of tunnels that would take them to Soldier's Peak before the exposure took its toll, and camped for the night in the dark passages, safely out of the biting wind. Alistair lay on his bedroll near the fire, for which Levi Dryden had sufficient foresight to gather wood while he awaited their arrival at the mouth of the tunnels, and watched as Zevran approached Rìona while she kept watch.

"Did I hear you correctly earlier today, Warden? Are we near your home?"

"Quite near," she replied, an edge of longing in her tone. "Three days vigorous walk to the west, perhaps, no more."

"You miss it," the Antivan observed, and Rìona nodded, swallowing hard.

"It's... difficult, to be so near and yet unable to go there. To know that Howe's swine have overrun the place, desecrating the home of my mother and father."

"Ah. This is a story I know well," the elf said. "Noble families fall all the time, in Antiva. Often at the hands of myself or other Antivan Crows. I wonder why they do not give it up as a bad proposition, being noble. Being a commoner seems somewhat less likely to make one a target, yes?"

"Maker only knows," Rìona answered with a reluctant chuckle.

After a moment, Zevran asked, "I am trying to understand your Fereldan politics. After all, it never hurts to know who might be in the market for an assassin's skills. Your family, they stood in the way of this man, Howe?"

"My family's relationship with Rendon Howe was a difficult one," she replied. "When they were young, he and my father fought together to oust the Orlesians, and my father called him a friend and ally, though in private my family had misgivings about the man. Why Howe and Loghain ended up allied with one another I really can't say, but I'm certain Howe's vendetta against my family suited Loghain's purposes nicely."

Zevran nodded. "Then it was this Loghain who wanted your family dead? They interfered with his bid for power?"

"Actually I think it's more complex than that." Rìona stirred the embers of the fire with a stick and laid another piece of wood upon it. "My father was always in favor of open trade and diplomatic relations with Orlais, much to Loghain's fury. Highever is a port city, you see, and stood to profit from such associations. But Loghain has, I think, gone mad with paranoia regarding the Orlesians. According to Bodhan Feddic, the dwarven merchant with whom we sometimes cross paths, Loghain's troops are now occupying the city of Highever proper, spreading the fiction that it was an uprising which killed my family. With Highever under their control, Loghain and Howe now hold every major port in Ferelden. The mountain passes are easily defensible, and now there is nowhere Orlesian chevaliers could make port if they attempted to enter Ferelden by sea. While the darkspawn overrun the country to the south, in the north Loghain is wasting men and resources to barricade us against an invasion that exists entirely in his imagination."

Alistair made a startled sound, drawing her attention. He'd known that Rìona was far more politically aware than he himself was, but he'd never actually listened to her analyze the political equation. It never had occurred to him to dig deeper for Loghain's motivations for his actions at Ostagar, but laid out so clearly, it made perfect sense.

"I thought you were asleep," Rìona murmured. It was the first time since the Circle Tower that she had spoken to him of her own accord, except to explain their plans or give him instructions.

"Did we cause this?" he heard himself asking, a half-formed suspicion rising to his lips before he was even really aware of it. "The Grey Wardens, I mean. Duncan pressed Cailan into calling for reinforcements from Orlais. Is that what made Loghain do this?"

A shadow passed over her face, something full of sorrow and regret. "No," she answered with a shake of her head. "I thought that at first, also, but Loghain's plans were clearly laid before Ostagar. He sent Jowan to Redcliffe to poison Arl Eamon before Ostagar, and unleashed Howe to massacre my family. Loghain's bid for power was underway before Cailan ever consented to admit the Orlesians into Ferelden."

"Oh, thank the Maker," Alistair breathed. "But then... _why?_"

"I don't know," Rìona said, shrugging helplessly. "Something pushed him over the edge into madness, but I don't know what. We may never know."

She turned her attention back to the fire, dismissing him, and at length, Alistair rolled onto his side, turning his back to her. He willed himself not to hear whatever Zevran flirtation murmured to her next. 

* * *

They were aware that there was demonic corruption at work within Soldier's Peak before they even emerged from the tunnels in sight of the massive old fortress. Until Rìona said something, Alistair hadn't even realized how familiar it had become to feel those places where the Veil was weak. But once they were attacked by the first wave of undead, whom Wynne had explained were actually corpses inhabited by the weaker ranks of demons, it was unmistakable.

Grimly, Alistair wondered if, sooner or later, they were going to manage to find a place where they weren't being attacked by demons and undead. They seemed to spend more time fighting such things than they actually did darkspawn.

It resonated, to learn that Soldier's Peak had been besieged and its Wardens killed because they had participated in a rebellion against a tyrant.

"Where have I heard this story before?" muttered Alistair as Rìona attempted to make sense of a half-burned tome that had been maintained by the keep's archivist. "Oh, that's right, we're living it."

"Suddenly the orders from Weisshaupt that Duncan spoke of, for Fereldan Wardens to remain politically neutral, make a great deal more sense," she agreed with a frown, surprised enough by the revelation that the Grey Wardens had engaged in a rebellion that she forgot she was avoiding Alistair. "These fools had no idea that they were leaving Ferelden vulnerable to a Blight that would happen a hundred years hence. Maker's mercy! What would we have done if King Maric hadn't reversed the decree exiling the Wardens from Ferelden?"

"Some good it did us," he grumbled. "He let us back in, but not in sufficient numbers to be decisive. If there had been more of us at Ostagar, we might have ended this Blight there, with or without Loghain's treachery."

"Or there simply might have been more corpses on the battlefield when all was said and done."

He couldn't argue with that.

As surprising as it was to discover the body of the old Warden-Commander, Sophia Dryden, still being animated by a demon, it was even more shocking to find the Grey Warden mage who had summoned the demons to fight against King Arland's soldiers and subsequently lost control of them was still alive. Not only had he not succumbed to the taint, but he'd spent the last century shielding Soldier's Peak, so that the demons slipping through the tear he'd made in the Veil could not escape out into the world. His means, however, were appalling. One by one, he'd tortured and killed his fellow Grey Wardens in an effort to unlock the secrets of the taint within their blood. In doing so, he'd prolonged his own life, fended off the Calling, and kept the demons at bay.

Rìona's face had been twisted with loathing when Avernus submitted himself to her judgment after he helped them defeat the demon inhabiting Sophia Dryden and sealed the tear he'd made in the Veil by summoning demons all those years ago.

"Don't you see what you've done here?" she demanded when he requested to be allowed to continue on with his so-called research, her voice shaking with rage. "You've made everything worse, for both mages and Grey Wardens! If word of what happened here should get out—! Your use of blood magic and your _idiotic_ decision to summon demons is precisely the sort of thing that makes people so afraid of mages that they are happy to see them imprisoned by the Chantry. And you take _pride_ in it! You and Sophia Dryden, both, you just assumed that any means could be justified. And now Ferelden stands poised to be consumed by a Blight and we wonder why so few here trust Grey Wardens. You tortured and murdered your own brethren and all you can do is talk about what glorious things you might have accomplished if you'd had a bit more time or a few more sacrifices. No, Avernus. No more. It stops here. For your crimes, I sentence you to death."

The old man knelt before her and Rìona plunged her dagger into his heart without hesitation. Seeing her face, Alistair knew a moment of fear, for there was something mad and desperate in her eyes. Up until that moment, she'd been merciful to everyone who had sought mercy from her, even the blood mages and abominations in the Circle Tower. And yet she stared down at Avernus' corpse as though she might spit upon it.

"Search the keep," she commanded, her voice hollow as she wiped her dagger upon his robes. "Find whatever supplies may be useful and bring them down to the outbuildings."

The others dispersed to do as she'd instructed, but Alistair followed her back to Avernus' lab, where she stood staring at the flask of potion that had been the triumph of his research, intended to unlock the potential of the taint in their blood and make them more powerful.

"What are you going to do with that?" he asked softly.

"I want to smash it."

"Then do it."

"Smashing it won't bring back the Wardens he slew to make it," she said. "They were doomed anyway. Making _this_ gave their deaths meaning. Or so he claimed."

Alistair moved before her, until she was forced to do more than glance back at him over her shoulder. He stood before her until she looked up and met his eyes.

"What do _you_ think?"

"I would hate to make all that suffering he inflicted meaningless, but where does it end? Never in their most cynical intrigues and seductions did my parents ever _use_ people the way I've seen the Grey Wardens do. Sophia Dryden had Avernus using mind domination against the nobility to sway them to the Wardens' side against King Arland, even the Couslands of Highever."

Alistair gawked in astonishment. "This Arland may have been a cretin and a tyrant, but there is simply no justification for that."

"Is that what it means to be a Grey Warden?" Rìona demanded, her mouth twisting in derision. "Each life is put on a balance to see if its worth outweighs the benefit of its ending? Anything to defeat the Blight, isn't that what Duncan said? Should I employ a blood mage to turn the Landsmeet against Loghain?"

"Of course not," Alistair said with a shake of his head. What had happened, he wondered, between Rìona and Duncan that she kept coming back to how ruthless he had been? "Though, come to think of it, that does cast a rather disturbing light on the fact that Loghain seems to be seeking allies who are blood mages."

Rìona groaned. "Oh, Maker's blood! Surely not even he's that mad."

"Maybe, maybe not," Alistair shrugged. "I'm sure we'll find out soon enough. For now, the question is what we're going to go with this. Avernus lived over a hundred years. He never succumbed to the Calling. The secret may be in there, in that flask. We may be able to delay or avoid the Calling ourselves."

"Then you're saying you want to use it."

"I didn't say that. The thought of using it revolts me. But then, so does the thought of letting it go to waste."

Nodding grimly, Rìona seized, then hesitated.

"I dare not. My babe..."

Alistair nodded and took it from her. With a deep breath, he drained it. For a moment, it felt as though his blood was on fire, burning within him. Pain wracked his body. He cried out and then the sensation faded away, leaving him shaken.

"I'm done being merciful with those who know no mercy," Rìona declared roughly. "Anyone who thinks they have the right to use others as a pawn for their own ends meets justice by my hand. I'm not giving my life to save this land only to let them destroy it."

Before Alistair could answer, she turned and walked away and did not look back.

When they emerged from the main keep, Leliana ran to them, practically skipping with joy.

"There's a bathhouse!" the bard squealed, seizing Rìona's hand. "With pools fed by a hot spring, and it's still serviceable!"

In an instant, the grimness left Rìona's face and her eyes brightened, a smile parting her lips. Suddenly, she was simply an eighteen-year-old girl who had been raised in luxury, facing the prospect of comforts she had not experienced for far too long.

She and Leliana practically ran for the bathhouse. Alistair followed them at a somewhat more sedate pace, though the prospect of a hot bath was as welcome to him as it was to anyone else. As they approached the outbuilding to which Leliana led them, a hint of sulfur was in the air. Sten was standing outside a decrepit lean-to that seemed to actually cover the entrance to a cave with his arms crossed, scowling. Zevran was with him, looking pouty.

"Your mages are inside already," Sten complained. "What is the purpose of this delay? Do we not have an archdemon to locate?"

"It's mid-afternoon already, Sten," Rìona said, practically twitching with her eagerness to get inside. "There's no point in making our way through the tunnels and down the mountain tonight, for it will be full dark before we reach the end of the tunnels. We may as well stay here and take advantage of the shelters provided, and get a fresh start for Denerim on the morrow. If you don't wish to use the baths, however, you are welcome to abstain."

Rìona turned to enter the bathhouse, only to glance at Zevran as he hesitated to follow.

"The mage, Wynne, she says, having lived in the tower all her life she is used to sharing, so long as everyone behaves himself." The petulance in his tone conveyed the elf's opinion on that particular topic, and Rìona's lips quirked in response. "But Morrigan... ah, she has threatened dire consequences if I should show my face within before she is finished."

"The baths at Highever were communal, so I have no objections to sharing," Rìona answered firmly. "I'm not going to make anyone wait out here in the cold who does not wish to do so. Come."

Though he wasn't entirely certain what he intended to do, Alistair followed, because it seemed a better option than waiting outside with Sten. The bathhouse appeared to actually be two buildings. The first was an antechamber built outside the cavern, with hooks for their clothing and even racks for weapons and armor, to keep them safe from the steam within the cavern itself. Alistair began to regret not remaining outside, however, when Rìona, Leliana and Zevran began helping each another with their armor in their rush to get to the baths.

He'd never bathed in the presence of women before, at least not since he was a little boy in Redcliffe. At the monastery, there had been certain days on which the sisters would use the bathhouse, and certain days on which the templars and initiates would have use of it. Terror filled him at the thought of being nude with them and his body unwillingly reacting.

"Why the hesitation, my friend?" Zevran asked, already half out of his armor, a fact which Alistair was trying not to notice. He kept seeing hints of skin where Rìona and Leliana undressed just at the edge of his peripheral vision. "Surely you will not deny us the pleasure of seeing you..."

"Oh, Maker's breath!" Alistair muttered, beginning to make his way to the door. If this kept up it was going to be Brother Ruarc all over again.

"Stop it, Zevran," Rìona said firmly. "The 'best behavior' policy Wynne proposed is still in place, in case you were wondering. Alistair?"

"Yes?" he asked reluctantly, his hand ready to push open the door.

"I take it you're not accustomed to communal baths?"

"At the monastery? Um, no."

"Very well, you're welcome to go, if you like, and wait until the rest of us are done," she suggested kindly. "But you'll find it rather lonely, I think, standing outside listening to everyone else talking and enjoying themselves."

That made him hesitate, for it sounded absolutely miserable. Too many years of being the odd man out amongst the templar initiates. Too noble for the commoners, too base-born for the noblemen's sons, he'd never found himself welcomed anywhere, sitting on the outskirts of their circles, never welcomed within.

"The thing to remember about communal baths," she continued as he turned to face her, refusing to let his eyes drop below her bare shoulders. Her voice had taken on that same soothing tone she'd used when he'd been so wretchedly embarrassed in the Fade, "is that one cannot necessarily control what one's body might do. But so long as everyone is discreet and _respectful_," that word was punctuated by a stern look at Zevran, who nodded his head in assent, "and behaves as an adult, there's no reason for anyone to be self-conscious. In short, this is not a prelude to an orgy. You have nothing to fear."

"I never suggested—!" he began to protest, and then Rìona smiled, and Leliana giggled, and he realized she'd been teasing him.

Teasing him, yes, but not unkindly. That was a change. Alistair found himself offering a crooked grin in return.

"May I help you with your buckles?" Leliana offered, still smiling, and Alistair relented with a sigh. For a mercy, nervousness seemed to be quelling his body's instinctive reaction to the proximity of bare female skin.

"Pretend it's not even there, my friend," Zevran advised quietly as he walked past Alistair and proceeded into the cavern while Leliana came to help him with his vambraces and couters. With his eyes firmly on the floor, Alistair dared a fleeting glance to see that despite his teasing, the elf wasn't actually reacting all that much, and that everyone was ignoring what reaction there was.

Rìona excused herself when Morrigan began protesting Zevran's presence. Alistair heard her deliver to Morrigan the same speech she'd given Zevran and moments later, Morrigan emerged from the cavern to storm out into the snow. He caught a glimpse of her transforming into a wolf before the door closed behind her.

"Well, that must be warmer than those rags she calls clothes," Leliana said with a giggle. "I think we'll all be happier without _her_ company."

He thanked Leliana once she'd helped him with the buckles and ties that were the hardest to reach and said he would manage the rest himself. Leliana gave him an understanding smile and hurried into the baths with an excited squeal.

He took a long moment to calm himself, willing his body to unresponsiveness, and he was struck by how different this felt, after so much time spent disheartened and depressed that he couldn't muster any interest in such things. Frustrating and sometimes uncomfortable, yes, and certainly with the potential to be humiliating. But it was also exhilarating, and marvelously vital. He felt like he was rousing from a deep slumber to discover the waking world to be a shining, brilliant place full of new things to explore.

No one even glanced at him when he entered the bathing cavern, feeling horribly and deliciously self-conscious. Despite the tensions that ran through their party on a daily basis, everyone seemed relaxed and at-ease. The pools were deep enough that, when he sat, the water came up to his upper chest. Zevran and the women were up to their necks. That made ignoring their nudity easier; between the water and the wafting clouds of steam, there was very little to see beyond the flush that suffused their faces and brought beads of sweat to their brows in the torch-lit cavern.

No one seemed nearly as interested in actually washing as they were in just sitting there in the hot water soaking. Alistair sat silently, for the most part, while Rìona and Wynne carried on a conversation about life inside the Circle tower. Rìona gave the Circle mage another recitation about Aodhán, but her voice, nearly slurred with relaxation, lacked that ragged edge of pain it had held when she'd told Alistair and Leliana about the twin brother she had lost.

"Ah, child, you might resent that the templars came to take him away from you," Wynne said comfortingly, "but you must understand, that island and that tower keep non-mages out as much as they keep mages in. The templars are not nearly as big a threat to us as superstition and fear. Do you think your family, loving as I am sure they were, could have shielded your brother from an angry mob looking for someone to blame for a bad harvest?"

Rìona's half-lidded eyes opened. "I... hadn't thought of it in those terms," she replied, and there was a vulnerability in her voice that pulled on something within Alistair.

It was strange. Their company sometimes chatted and socialized around the campfire at night, but it was never like this. There was an intimacy here, in the warmth and the steam, the sort that Alistair had known for a short time with the other Grey Wardens and then lost at Ostagar. The bonds of camaraderie were being formed in a way that was almost tangible. Even with Zevran, who actually managed to be almost likeable when he wasn't driving Alistair insane with his heavy-handed innuendo and flirtations... or, well, trying to kill them.

At length, a yawning Wynne excused herself and left. Sometime later, Leliana did the same, and then it was just himself and Rìona and Zevran.

The atmosphere almost immediately shifted.

Alistair couldn't pinpoint exactly how, for nothing was said that might account for the change. But suddenly easy camaraderie degenerated into expectant silence. Rìona, who had been so relaxed moments before, was now studiously refusing to look at Alistair, and Alistair was aware of the seductive potential of the situation in a way he hadn't been when Wynne and Leliana had been there. Zevran's eyes had taken on a speculative gleam, as though he was trying to decide which of them he should focus his attentions upon.

Suddenly it was much more difficult to prevent his body from reacting. The steam that wafted from the surface of the water now seemed laden with awareness and potential. Sooner or later, that potential was going to become reality, and whoever remained in this pool with Rìona was going to lie with her.

Alistair knew it, as certainly as he knew the sun would rise on the morrow. As certainly as he knew hordes of darkspawn were spreading throughout Ferelden to the south.

He wanted it to be him. Maker, how he wanted it! He was achingly hard and so full of yearning he thought it would drive him mad.

But he wasn't the one Rìona was looking at, and he didn't know how to _make_ her look at him. He was still convinced she'd felt what he had felt that day in the Circle Tower, but since then she had been avoiding him, and he wasn't like her or Zevran, confident and certain of his appeal. He was simply Alistair, the bastard no one had ever wanted or cared for.

If he left now, it would be Zevran she took to her tent from here on out. But he had no right to stay, no right to stake his own claim, or any claim to stake for that matter. How could he, when most of the time he wasn't even sure he approved of what she did, and when she had declared she had no intention of changing?

And so Alistair left, awkwardly, hurriedly, trying to discreetly conceal his erection until he was out of sight. And as he dressed in the antechamber, he heard Zevran's voice, low and suggestive, sighing, "And here we are, alone at last, my beautiful Warden."

"So it would seem," Rìona murmured in response.

"I have had the feeling you have been avoiding me," Zevran remarked, his tone slightly chiding. That surprised Alistair. It hadn't seemed that way from where he had sat watching these last weeks since Zevran had joined their company. But then Leliana hadn't believed him when he told her Rìona was avoiding him, either.

"That's not entirely accurate. I've merely been delaying the inevitable for a while."

"I do not understand your meaning."

"Don't be coy, Zevran. It doesn't suit you. The sun will set, the moon will rise, the tide will turn, and you and I will fuck." Alistair winced to hear it put so bluntly, but there it was, out in the open with all of Rìona's customary frankness.

"If it is so inevitable, then why have you been avoiding it?" Alistair heard Zevran ask as he rushed to dry off and dress faster, pulling his linen shirt over his head while his chest was still damp. It was brutally cold out there on the mountain, but he no longer cared.

"Because what I _don't_ need right now are complications." And then there was a soft swish and splash of water, as though one or both of them had moved.

"Then by all means, let us not complicate matters," Zevran purred.

Alistair gathered up the remaining pieces of his armor and fled into the night before he could hear any more.


	23. Chapter Twenty Three: Complications

As they made their way south from the Coastlands and east across the Bannorn toward Denerim, it became apparent to Rìona that she had failed to outfit her company properly for winter. Though she had been invited to help herself to whatever stores Redcliffe had available, the town had been too devastated by their losses in the undead attacks to have much to spare, for numerous properties had been destroyed in addition to the loss of life, and so Rìona had only claimed the bare minimum she thought would be necessary.

Though snowfall was astonishingly scarce for late Wintermarch once out of the mountains, the temperatures were often freezing at night and only slightly warmer during the day. Only the fact that they were constantly walking prevented them from suffering from exposure, but it was still miserable. Several times they were set upon by bandits and packs of wolves driven north to scavenge ahead of the Blight. Once the bandits were dispatched, their scant supplies invariably ended up contributing to provisioning her company. Courtesy of Morrigan's knowledge of how to survive in the Wilds, they also learned to stuff into their boots and wrap around their legs the scraps of wolf fur they hadn't stitched together covers for their bedrolls. Still they needed proper cloaks, warmer garments to wear under their armor and better tents for, once the winter passed, spring would bring heavy rainfall and the tents they had liberated from Loghain's mercenary troops in Lothering were somewhat worse for wear.

That was going to require coin, and they had little to spare. They had met the dwarven trader, Bodhan Feddic, a few times in their travels, and Rìona had spent a great deal of their funds on potions and poultices from his stock and enchantments for their weapons. The stitching on Leliana's scavenged studded leather was beginning to come apart, and Zevran's armor had taken considerable damage during his failed attack on their company and would need to be replaced as well.

In addition, the chainmail they had found in Lothering for Alistair was taking more abuse than it was intended to receive, for it was intended to be worn by light infantry troops. He needed a set of full plate armor, but that, at least, would cost them very little. In exchange for helping his family investigate the mystery of his ancestress's fate, Levi Dryden had agreed to have his brother Mikhail re-forge the armor Sophia Dryden had worn into a suit that would fit Alistair. They were to collect it once they left Denerim, to return to Redcliffe with news of Brother Genitivi and the Urn of Sacred Ashes.

Alistair had expressed some misgivings about wearing armor that proclaimed him a Grey Warden at a time when there was a bounty on the heads of Grey Wardens, especially a suit intended for the Warden-Commander of Ferelden, when in truth it was Rìona who was their leader. But the plate armor was of no use to Rìona, while Alistair was in need. Besides, they were done trying to pass through Ferelden anonymously. They would announce their identity to the world and dare Loghain to level his charges against them in a public court where they might actually be able to defend themselves and bring Loghain's own crimes to light.

Despite his protestations, she could see Alistair was pleased at the prospect of wearing the Warden-Commander's armor, for being a Grey Warden was a much greater part of him than it would ever be for Rìona. That was good, for it seemed very little made Alistair smile these days. She had hurt him by taking Zevran into her tent. It had become apparent the morning they left Soldier's Peak when she had emerged from her tent, relaxed and replete, with Zevran following her. There had been a moment of anguish in Alistair's eyes before he looked away, and when he looked back, his normally expressive face was bland and impassive. He was less quick to make a joke these days, and often his humor was crueler and more biting than was normally his wont.

The jibes he traded with Morrigan became more scathing with each passing day, with Morrigan often provoking the confrontations by needling Alistair about Rìona and Zevran. For that matter, her manner toward Rìona was scarcely more tolerant. The thought occurred to Rìona that if it kept up, she would have to consider sending Morrigan away from their company, for the sake of their _esprit de corps_. Why Morrigan was being so especially venomous these days was a mystery. It was almost as though she was attempting to drive Alistair away or estrange him even further from Rìona. But why?

These were the questions that plagued her as they made their way east across Ferelden. The journey took longer than it ought to have done, in large part due to the fact that they were traveling cross-country in an effort to evade the notice of Loghain's patrols, and also because they found themselves unexpectedly encountering bands of darkspawn attacking refugee caravans and other hazards. By the time they neared Denerim, it was nearly two months since the events at Ostagar and over three weeks since they had left the Circle Tower. It was on the approach to Denerim that they met another band of assassins, though these had been hired to kill Leliana rather than Grey Wardens.

"Marjolaine?" Rìona asked when they had finished interrogating the leader of the assassins, his life being the price of his information. Leliana had told her about the betrayal she had suffered from her former bard master and lover.

"It has to be," the bard answered, an echo of past agony in her eyes. "But why now?"

Rìona shrugged. "Does it truly matter? I won't have her threatening my people on top of everything else we're facing."

Leliana looked away thoughtfully for a moment, but when she looked back, her eyes were cold and hard. "I agree. She must be dealt with. This address is in Denerim; I think we should pay her a visit."

Zevran chuckled. "I have always wanted to pit my skills against one of the famed bards of Orlais. This should be fun."

The ambush proved another delay in their journey, for they were compelled to make camp early and tend minor injuries as well as cleaning their weapons and armor. Rìona had just finished rubbing oil on her leathers when Zevran ducked his head into her tent. "Up for a little training while there is still daylight?" he offered, and she rose, nodding eagerly.

Zevran had been teaching her about attacking from stealth, a skill that was useful in more than just assassination, for she could use it to blend in among the trees and play sniper with her bow rather than standing in the open, vulnerable, as she took aim. It would lessen the burden of defending her in combat on Alistair and Sten, and ensure more of her arrows found their mark, for it is harder for an enemy to defend against an attack they don't see coming. Such skills, he said, were best learned before her pregnancy began to hamper her agility. And so Rìona found herself moving quietly through the underbrush beyond their camp in the cold afternoon air, attempting to locate Zevran and sneak up on him without being detected.

She paused, crouching in the shadow of a tree, and listened for a moment trying to pick out some noise that would give her an indication of her prey's location, and at length heard a rustle off somewhere to her right. As silently as she could, she slipped from shadow to shadow, keeping low to the ground where there was little cover, until she found herself on the edge of a small clearing.

But it was not Zevran who stood there.

Alistair stood with his back to her, with one forearm up, pillowing his forehead as he leaned against the bole of a massive tree, and the other hand down below his waist. His breeches were bunched around his hips. Thinking he was heeding the call of nature, Rìona began to back silently away so as not to embarrass him, when suddenly he groaned, a low, desperate, almost anguished sound.

"Sweet Maker!" he muttered urgently, and it was then that she realized his hand was moving, pumping, and his hips thrusting minutely in time with the strokes.

Rìona's mouth went dry.

The silence in the clearing was punctuated by soft gliding sounds and the slap of skin on skin when his hand hit his thighs. She could not see in detail what he did, but it didn't matter. His soft sighs and moans were sufficient, or the way he would reach further down, his wrist curling as he reached back to stroke and gently squeeze his sac. He murmured a continuous litany of supplications to the Maker and Andraste and though she prayed not to hear her own name, that was in there, too.

She wanted him to turn around, wanted to see the transport on his beautiful face when he found his release. She wanted to flee, to run far and fast from the inescapable reality of her burgeoning feelings for him. She wanted to go to him, to sink to her knees before him and take him into her mouth, to feel the flexing of his backside beneath her hands as he thrust into her throat, to taste the spill of his seed upon her tongue.

It paralyzed her for a moment, as Alistair's moans became more constant, as the pace of his pumping hand increased. She was a mass of conflicting impulses, each one more impossible as the last. She wanted him, and he was the one man in all of Thedas she simply _could not_ have.

She wanted to weep.

Shaking with the power of her own longing, she slipped away, back the way she came. Alistair would not thank her for spying upon him. And so she left, the unmistakable sound of his moment of release ringing in her ears as she retreated. She forgot her purpose for having been in the woods in the first place and made her way back to her tent, where she sat within, her knees pulled up to her chest as she lost herself in thought.

She remembered those final months at Highever when she had begun to fear that she was becoming too attached to Ser Gilmore, that she might be in danger of losing her heart. That was nothing to the fright she felt now; her feelings for Ser Gilmore had been a trifling infatuation compared to what she had felt since that day in the Harrowing chamber.

Though she had tried to avoid Alistair after the Circle Tower, it had been impossible. He was too much a part of their joint endeavors; if they didn't work together, they would surely fail. And she had missed his company, for she found she genuinely _liked_ Alistair. He made her smile even when she didn't want to, and he was so sincerely delighted when he succeeded in doing so. He was warm and funny and so very easy to like.

But he could not be hers.

In other circumstances, she might have pursued him relentlessly, used every weapon in her arsenal until she had him. But she could not. He already considered her a degenerate harlot, and it was troubling enough that he might not be able to accept her easy approach to pleasure. She could not renounce what she was without turning her back on all her parents had raised her to be, and she would not betray them that way. Any attempt at an affair between them was surely doomed on the basis of that fact alone.

But his being King Maric's son made matters worse. Perhaps it might be best to tell him everything now, how Cailan had meant to marry her, how she bore his child, how deeply ironic it was that she should have found herself fallen from that position only to discover her single most indispensable companion was, in fact, Cailan's half-brother. But she couldn't.

What if he decided she only wanted him for his connection to the throne? What if he despised her for how deliberately and calculatedly she'd set out to seduce Cailan and earn herself a crown? If she let herself love him, that would destroy her.

There were also certain political realities. Despite his denials, he was an heir to the Theirin throne. There was a good chance that whether Alistair willed it or not, he would find himself compelled to assume the throne, and Rìona was now nothing more than a fallen noblewoman with a bastard babe in her belly. She could never hope for more than to be his mistress, as Duncan had suggested she should be to Cailan.

Her pride was not what it had once been; that might have been enough for her. But now she had a child to consider, and even if she did not, she knew Alistair would never be happy with such an arrangement.

And then there was Zevran.

With Zevran, she would never need to be afraid. He would never give her his heart unguarded, even if she wanted him to do so, nor would he expect hers in return. He would never judge her choices, would never ask more of her than she was capable of giving. He was capable of returning her aptitude for pleasure in full measure. And while she spent her nights with Zevran, Alistair would keep his distance, thinking her to be spoken for. It should have been perfect, should have been safe and comforting, but for these moments when her longing for Alistair caught her unawares and would not be denied.

No matter how much pleasure she found with Zevran, it could not erase that moment when she had first felt Alistair's hesitant, questioning lips on hers. That moment had branded itself indelibly upon her soul.

She emerged from her tent when she heard Zevran's voice, obviously having given up waiting for her in the woods. She smiled and apologized, explaining that she had been unable to find him, and then turned her attention to helping with the preparation of supper. Beyond all else, she avoided Alistair's eyes, afraid that she would be unable to pretend nothing had happened.

Afterward, she and Leliana were to keep first watch together, and so while the others retired to their tents—Zevran lingering a while longer before slipping into Rìona's own tent—Leliana took up her lute and began to sing softly. Rìona's own talents had never extended to singing or playing, but she enjoyed keeping watch with Leliana for this reason. She patrolled the perimeter of the campsite with Conall at her side while Leliana played, returning to the campfire only when the cold drove her to seek its warmth.

At length, Leliana set her lute aside and looked at Rìona where she sat staring into the fire.

"So, you and Zevran?" the bard began softly, a teasing note in her voice.

Rìona smiled. She had been waiting for this, knowing Leliana's penchant for gossip. Privacy in a camp where everyone slept in tents was nothing but a polite fiction, so it was unlikely there was anyone who didn't know how she and Zevran passed their time together. Normally, she didn't mind gossiping with Leliana. Growing up isolated in Highever as she had been—by her own choice—she had never known the pleasure of having a female friend before. She'd had Nan and her mother and Oriana to speak with, but that hadn't been the same.

Now, however, she wasn't sure she wanted to try to explain. "Yes, what about us?"

"I confess I am surprised. After the Circle Tower, I had thought you and Alistair were... growing closer, no?"

"Don't, Leliana. Please."

"Ah, but you did not see the look on his face as he carried you from the Harrowing chamber!" Leliana gave a theatrical swoon.

"Oh, Maker! Please. I cannot possibly endure any matchmaking at this time."

"Oh, I'm sorry," Leliana looked surprised. "I won't tease you about it, if you prefer. Is it about what you said before, about the babe's father? Do you still mourn him?"

Rìona shook her head. "It's a bit more complicated than that. Besides, Alistair doesn't approve of me, remember?"

For that, Leliana had no ready answer and they passed much of their watch together in silence, Rìona withdrawn and thoughtful. Some hours later, there was a startled cry from Alistair's tent as the inevitable dreams of the archdemon awoke him and moments later, he emerged, using a blanket as a cloak to ward off the cold, and sat beside the fire.

Rìona shook her head. "We have to get you a proper woolen cloak in Denerim," she mused. They all needed cloaks, really. Another expense to add to their growing list.

He nodded, shivering. "I'm awake. I can take over watch now, if one of you wants to retire early."

Leliana sprang to her feet. "I'm really very tired, thank you. Good night!"

Rìona stared after the retreating redhead, cocking a skeptical eyebrow, only to hear Alistair murmur, "You know, for a bard, she's really not all that subtle."

There was a moment of silence, and then Rìona found herself laughing helplessly, and Alistair was giving her his crooked, self-deprecating smile, which only made her laugh harder. This, she thought, wiping her eyes. This was why she was having a hard time repressing her feelings for him.

"So, um, there's something I've been meaning to ask you and I was reminded of it earlier, before I feel asleep," he ventured when the laughter had subsided. "I overheard Leliana asking you about the father of your babe."

Rìona tensed, her heart skipping a beat. "Yes, what of him?"

"Was he... Did he... did he die at Highever?"

"No," she said slowly. She looked at him again as he studied her carefully from across the fire. "He was lost at Ostagar."

"Oh, that's right, you said you..." A frown touched Alistair's brow for a moment, and then his eyes widened and a delighted smile began to curve his lips. Rìona could almost read his thoughts.

"No, Alistair," she said gently. "No. It was not Duncan."

"Oh." His crestfallen expression did nothing to ease her conscience at dashing his hopes. "But you said you and he—"

"Yes, we did."

"And that you were—"

"A maiden until we reached Ostagar, yes."

"Then—?"

Rìona closed her eyes again, scolding herself for not having foreseen the possibility that he would jump to that conclusion. "Do you _really_ want the details?"

"No, not really, but... Oh, blast it! Yes, all right? Yes, I do. Maker's breath! You were only at Ostagar for a few days!"

Irritated by the undercurrent of judgment in his words, Rìona found herself being rather more blunt than she had intended, taking cruel pleasure when he flinched at her specificity. "It was not Duncan who had my virginity, or at least not my maidenhead. I did not wish to conceive Duncan's child, so I did not allow him to release his seed near my womb." Her chin lifted defiantly. "Shall I be more explicit and describe to you precisely how he did have me?"

Alistair shook his head, squirming uncomfortably. "I had to ask..." he sighed. "All right, I'm sorry. My tone was uncalled for. I'm just... I'm trying to understand. Was it the man you were supposed to marry, then?"

"Yes."

"And you didn't mind conceiving _his_ child?"

"It wasn't my intention, but I took no precautions against it. After all, _he_ intended to marry me. Sooner or later I would have been expected to bear him an heir."

"And even though you were practically engaged, you still slept with Duncan?"

There it was again. That slight undertone of condemnation. Rìona bristled once more, and retaliated with the weapon she had at her disposal, using his prudery against him. "If you must know, things progressed... precipitously... the night I lay with my intended husband. I received little pleasure and no satisfaction from the event. I went to Duncan to remedy that situation, which he did. Quite admirably, I must say."

"Oh, Maker's blood!" Alistair cursed. He squirmed again, and Rìona took some malicious satisfaction in knowing he was likely fair to bursting out of his breeches. "I'm not trying to be an ass about this, really I'm not, but..."

"For not trying you've succeeded remarkably well," she answered rigidly. "I'm sorry, Alistair. I'm too tired to quarrel with you. But I won't be judged by you."

"I'm... trying. I am. After what... _happened_... in the Circle Tower, I _want_ to understand." Alistair fell silent, glancing awkwardly away. Finally he drew a deep breath, and asked, "Did Duncan know?"

"That I was to be married?" At Alistair's grim nod, she answered, "Yes. Duncan knew everything, long before we left Highever. He felt the political connection made by such an alliance would benefit the Grey Wardens. It's why I arrived at Ostagar a virgin in the first place, otherwise it's virtually certain I would have had Duncan back at Highever, or at the very least along the road to Ostagar."

Alistair looked unhappy about that, and Rìona found she could almost pity him. It was one thing to condemn her, but it was quite another to find fault with his hero and mentor. Perhaps Duncan's complicity would help assuage Alistair's qualms and help him find his own acceptance.

"And what about the Grey Wardens remaining a politically neutral force?" Alistair asked finally, searching for a less incendiary topic.

"Duncan wasn't naïve enough to believe that to be a realistic possibility any longer," Rìona answered. "Look around you, Alistair, at where an attempt to be neutral has led us. In peace time it weakened us so that when the Blight came, we were unprepared. The Wardens are dependent on the the nobility to provide tithes and recruits, and that means playing at politics, forming strategic alliances with the most powerful nobles. Neutrality was never any sort of achievable option. The best Duncan could possibly hope for was to minimize hostility, convert those who might be adversaries into allies, and engender as much goodwill as possible—which was a brutally difficult goal in and of itself, with Loghain set firmly against him. That's why recruiting me was so advantageous. My family had strong political alliances already in place that I could have used to the Grey Wardens' advantage. And had I made the marriage I intended to make, well, the possibilities would have been endless."

"I notice you refuse to name the man you meant to marry," Alistair observed.

"You're right."

"You really have no intention of ever telling me who the father of your baby was, do you?"

"Actually, I have no doubt you'll learn everything in time, but I really don't want to have that discussion tonight. I'm too weary and we're having entirely too much difficulty remaining civil on this subject."

"Oh."

Sighing, Rìona rose and went to Wynne's tent to wake the mage for her watch. Alistair was staring morosely into the fire once more, and she wanted to say something to soothe him, but... no, perhaps it was better this way. It would be easier to guard her heart if he was judgmental and disapproving. So she bid him goodnight and retreated to her tent, which Zevran had thoughtfully erected farther away from others to help maintain the illusion of privacy.

He was awake when she crawled inside and doffed her garments, hurriedly diving beneath the wolf pelts and woolen blankets into the cocoon of warmth his body had created. He grumbled about the chill of her skin but he was aroused and eager when he pressed against her, sharing his heat. She had barely stopped shivering when his hands began stroking her with a singular purpose in mind.

"Maker!" she whimpered against his mouth as his fingertips pinched her nipple hard enough to make her tense and writhe, then soothed the ache away a second later. He rolled her onto her back and settled himself in the cradle of her hips, grinding for a moment against her before he buried himself within her in a single sure surge. She cried out, biting on her wrist to stifle the sound, knowing Alistair and Wynne could hear them. Zevran whispered to her in Antivan as he moved slowly, inexorably driving her toward the precipice and over, again and again. Only when Rìona was limp and shaking, barely coherent beneath him, did he seek his own release, gripping her hips and driving hard into her yielding body, spilling inside her.

Rìona blinked. "What was that last thing you said?" she asked as he lay his weight atop her, panting. "Rinna?"

Zevran stiffened, pulling away. "Reina. The queen. Your name in Antivan, yes?"

"Why would you call me such a thing?"

"Is there a reason I shouldn't? It _is_ what your name means, is it not?" Zevran asked casually as they both sought the warmth of the blankets and pelts once more, before the flush of passion cooled. "And strangely appropriate, given what you have told me of your past. It was either strange chance or a frightening amount of foresight with which your parents named you."

"I... suppose that's true. It's simply that part of my life is gone, now. And perhaps that's for the best."

"As you wish, my lovely Warden," he acceded. "I shall be certain never to call you such again. You are not the only one who has a past you wish to leave behind."

She wondered, not for the first time, what it was in Zevran's past—besides his indenture to the Antivan Crows—that he wished to leave behind. It hadn't really struck her at the time they defeated his ambush that it had been a clumsy trap for so skilled an assassin. He had wanted to fail, and once again she wondered why.

"You are distracted tonight," he said moments later when she sighed.

"I'm tired, Zevran," Rìona said. "Since the night my family died, it's been constant travel, and one danger after another. Now here we are, not two days from Denerim bound on a superstitious fool's errand and I don't know what we're going to find there, with the city packed with Loghain's men. We need to equip ourselves better before we attempt to travel across Ferelden again back to Redcliffe and we haven't the funds to do that, which means we'll need to tarry in Denerim and find some employment, which only increases our chances of exposure. It never ends, and I'm just so very weary."

"Ah, but that is what I am here for, yes? To make the burden a little lighter without putting any unnecessary demands upon you?"

"Which I appreciate."

"Then let me do so," he coaxed. "Come now, sleep. Tomorrow we shall discuss what else I may do to help you."

And so she drifted to sleep with his voice murmuring softly in her ear, laying aside her burdens and confusion for the short amount of rest she was allotted. If in her dreams it was Alistair's voice, full of longing, which called her name as he pleasured himself, that was a complication for another day.


	24. Chapter Twenty Four: Connections

Though she had never attended functions of the royal court, Rìona had spent a considerable amount of time in Denerim—though, admittedly, not in the seedier portions of the city. The Couslands had usually wintered there, forging and renewing friendships and political alliances with the other nobles of the Landsmeet, rather than passing the winter snowbound in Highever. She had expected a sense of, if not homecoming, then at least comfortable familiarity upon entering the city, but it quickly became apparent that the capital was no longer the city she had known.

On their approach to the city, where the North Road and West Road merged into a single cobbled highway, Rìona had spied a huge plume of black smoke in the distance. When she had asked one of the refugees what it was, she was informed that it was a mass pyre for the indigent who had succumbed to starvation or the brutal cold of the harsh winter, camped outside the city gates. It had been burning day and night since the refugees started arriving at Denerim. Along with the constant funeral chant that had been sung in the chantries of the city since Ostagar in honor of the fallen troops, there was now a priest posted beside the pyre all day chanting for the souls of the deceased from the refugee camps.

In some ways, within the city it was almost worse. Her father had often remarked on Arl Howe's lack of ability in managing his arling; that same deficiency clearly had continued when he had assumed the mantle of the Arl of Denerim. There was no order within the city. Members of the city guard wearing Howe's device were all over, but few appeared to be doing their jobs. Some were drunk on duty, others taking advantage of their authority to harass and bully passing citizens who had done nothing wrong. A few even appeared to be running their own crime syndicates, taking bribes to allow gangs of thugs who preyed on the helpless and impoverished to continue operating.

Throngs of unruly mercenaries spilled out of every tavern and whorehouse, and lodgings were scarce. If Rìona had cherished any hope of finding affordable rooms at an inn, it was shattered. Only the most expensive of inns, the ones the refugees had no hope of paying for, still had rooms to let, and Rìona knew they could not afford those. What precious little coin they had would have to provision her company for winter weather. No doubt such provisions would come at a hefty price; with such things in high demand, the cost was sure to have soared.

Images of the Cousland Denerim estate rose up in her memory, and she yearned for its luxurious bedchambers and capable staff always ready to prepare a hot bath. Quickly, she turned her mind away from the thought. No doubt it was overrun by Howe's scum, its collections of art, silver and gold plate stolen to fill Howe's coffers. For all she knew, Howe himself was lodged there, if he hadn't taken over the the late Arl Urien's estate. Even if he wasn't, though, no doubt he had his men quartered there. It was a bitter, bitter thought.

Still, her imagination was worse than actually knowing, and so as they approached the city, Rìona made a request of Zevran, that he should carefully and discreetly scout the Cousland manor and ascertain what had been done with it. She briefly considered attempting to locate some of the staff who had been employed in the manor when the family was in residence during the winter season, and seek shelter for her company among them. But those who hadn't been killed when Howe's men attacked the manor would no doubt be in jeopardy if her presence in Denerim became known. So she refrained, though the temptation to re-forge a link to the people she had known in her past was strong.

"I think by the state of things, it's clear that provisioning ourselves is going to take considerably longer than simply seeking out this Brother Genitivi. We'll stay in the city for some days, I think, and attempt to find what work we can in order to afford our supplies. We also need to deal with Marjolaine; I won't have her interfering with our efforts against the Blight by menacing Leliana. After what happened in Lothering, I am reluctant to splinter our company too much, but I fear we'll be more conspicuous as a cluster.

"Morrigan, I want you to peruse the marketplace and see who the most likely vendors are to have what we need at a reasonable price. If you find a good bargain, take it, otherwise we'll come back and haggle later. We need sturdier tents and more blankets for bedrolls, linen and wool cloth to make garments to wear under our armor. We need boots, preferably fur-lined—and if the cobbler is willing to take some of our spare wolf pelts in on trade, so much the better—and heavy woolen cloaks. Wynne is handy with a needle as well, we might trade the remainder of our pelts for properly tanned furs, to line the cloaks also. Alistair, check the Chantry board and speak with local inn and shopkeepers about what odd jobs are available. Be discreet and say nothing of who you are. Sten, Leliana, Wynne and I will go deal with Marjolaine, and then we will reconvene in the central marketplace square near the chantry before the supper hour."

Dealing with Marjolaine turned out to be a greater trial than Rìona had anticipated. The Orlesian bard-master, a veritable queen of spies, was convinced that Leliana would sooner or later come seeking her to redress the wrong Marjolaine had done her in framing Leliana for her own crime. Rìona looked into the soulless eyes of the Orlesian spy and knew, even if she convinced Marjolaine to walk away, sooner or later, the bard-master would return to plague Leliana again.

It would hurt Leliana to kill her; Rìona knew that for certain. Leliana's feelings were still, even after all these years, too raw over Marjolaine's betrayal. She was still haunted by the love she'd felt for her mentor. Rìona wondered if some of that sweetness, that inherent goodness within Leliana would die if she took the life of the woman she had once loved. But then she remembered her words to Alistair at Soldier's Peak, about dealing with those who were themselves without mercy, and told Leliana that Marjolaine would never stop harassing her if allowed to live.

With tears shining in her eyes, Leliana agreed and what had begun as a negotiation devolved quickly into a bloodbath. It was easy to see where Leliana had learned her formidable fighting skills, for Marjolaine was no easy foe. But at length she lay dead in a pool of her own blood, with Leliana weeping over her corpse.

Rìona was appalled at herself when her first thought was that, if they could get rid of the bodies of Marjolaine and her hirelings, they could use her modest leased house for lodging during their stay in Denerim. But listening to Leliana's grief-ridden sobs, Rìona knew she could not ask her friend to sleep on the floor stained with Marjolaine's blood. Leaving the bard in Wynne's gentle care, Rìona set Sten to the task of posing as a qunari mercenary and disposing of the corpses lest they lead authorities back to her company.

"Tal'Vashoth," he informed her curtly, glowering. "These may look like qunari, but they do not follow the Qun."

"I see," Rìona replied, nodding absently. "I am sorry if it offends you, but if there are qu—_Tal'Vashoth_—mercenaries in the city, then you shouldn't look that out of place. There is enough disorder in Denerim right now that if you claim to have been their comrade no one will question it. Take them to the mass pyre outside the city and if anyone asks, tell them the woman is an Orlesian spy. Say the regent hired your band of mercenaries to deal with her and these fellows died in the fight."

Sten grumbled, but he could not argue that her plan was the most efficient way of explaining away the bodies. While he stripped the bodies of their armor to make them lighter to bear, Rìona went through Marjolaine's belongings. There was some coin there, and spare clothing. Most of it she left untouched to spare Leliana the ordeal of knowing they were scavenging from her dead lover. When she emerged from the bedchamber Leliana's eyes were dry, and she had Marjolaine's beautifully carved and polished bow slung over her shoulder.

"Come," Rìona said encouragingly, laying her hand alongside Leliana's face and kissing her blotchy cheek. "Let's seek out Brother Genitivi and put this behind us. You're free now."

Leliana was pensive as she, Rìona and Wynne set out in search of the address of the Chantry scholar Arlessa Isolde had given them. "Do you think she was right?" the bard asked at length. "Were she and I one in the same? Is that what made me such a good manipulator and spy?"

"_You_ are capable of kindness and mercy, and she was not," Wynne said firmly, and Rìona nodded in agreement.

"But I enjoyed it, once upon a time!" Leliana protested. "The danger and intrigue, the gambits and seductions. I thought I had left it all behind me, when I went to the Chantry, but there was always a part of me that was bored and restless there. I wouldn't have gone after her, seeking vengeance. But somewhere inside, I always wished I would. Doesn't that make me as bad as her?"

"You may have been running from yourself in the Chantry, a bit," Rìona conceded. "But that doesn't mean you're like her, either. There's a middle ground in there, somewhere. Her only loyalty was to the coin she earned, stealing and selling secrets. You might have those same skills, and you might even enjoy playing the games of intrigue, but if you use those skills for a greater purpose, if you are responsible to someone other than yourself..."

Rìona's voice trailed off, a lump growing unexpectedly in her throat. Suddenly she was reminded of Duncan, his ruthless, single-minded pragmatism. But even he had had a purpose, a reason for using people as he did. His goal was defeating the Blight, not simply his own wealth and power. He'd known kindness and mercy; he'd saved Daveth from the gallows, after all.

Convincing Leliana that Marjolaine must die was the sort of thing he would have done, though. He wouldn't have allowed Marjolaine's intrigues to interfere with his efforts to combat the Blight.

Maker. How was it possible to miss him, when she'd hated him so at their last parting? Had these weeks since Ostagar changed her so much that she was, Andraste have mercy upon her, starting to become like him?

Wynne and Leliana were frowning at her, and Rìona shook off the uncomfortable thought. "You can be who you are and still not be like Marjolaine," she finished at last, and Leliana nodded, not looking particularly comforted by the thought.

"I need to think of this a while," she said softly, and fell silent.

There was little to comfort her troubled spirit at Brother Genitivi's house. Rìona knew the moment she stepped into the building that something had died in there. Her sensitive gorge began to rise; it was an effort of extreme will to suppress the impulse to spew up her last meal long enough to question the man who passed himself off as Brother Genitivi's assistant, Weylon. It quickly became apparent that he was lying, and trying to steer Rìona and her company in a false direction.

Disgusted and impatient with the charade, Rìona demanded access to Genitivi's notes, and when the man calling himself Weylon refused, she pushed past him toward the bedroom, from whence the worst of the odor seemed to be emanating. He attacked, and in an instant, Wynne had channeled the power of earth to petrify him—a spell she'd deemed needful to learn after the events in the Harrowing chamber—and with an arrow, Leliana shattered the brittle block he had become under Wynne's spell.

In the bedchamber, they found a trunk containing the remains of what Rìona assumed had been the true Weylon. Overcome by the stench, she promptly sought out a chamberpot to relieve her distress as Wynne slammed the lid of the trunk down.

"Come, Leliana, we'll drag this outside," the Circle mage instructed as Rìona heaved helplessly. "We'll have Sten take it to the pyre when he returns, for it certainly cannot remain here while we rifle through the brother's notes and writings. Thank the Maker it's not summer. We'd have to burn the house down to rid it of the odor!"

Once she was finished being ill, Rìona went outside into the cold air to calm her stomach and revive her senses. There she stood, chilled but calmer, and considered their options while Wynne and Leliana lugged out the trunk with the corpse inside.

Truthfully, removing the trunk did much to clear the foul miasma from within the house, and they left the windows open as they set out for the marketplace to meet with the rest of their companions. Rìona had already decided upon seeing the quantity of notes and papers in the brother's study that they would need time and access to go over them all and get some indication of Genitivi's whereabouts. Hopefully they would lead her someplace more proximal than the shores of Lake Calenhad, which was where the false Weylon had attempted to direct them.

Even once she explained that, however, her companions stared at her in disbelief when she announced that, if they could clear enough of the stench to make the place habitable, they would be lodging in the brother's house for the duration of their stay in Denerim.

"Isn't that a bit... gruesome?" Alistair asked skeptically, falling into step beside her as she led the way through the market district back to Genitivi's house. "I mean, a man was murdered there."

Rìona lifted a brow at him. "Would you rather sleep in a cold tent outside the city among the refugees, where we'll be more exposed should Loghain's men decide to notice there are two Grey Wardens on his doorstep?"

"No, of course not, but..."

"Our only other option is the house where we just killed someone Leliana once loved," she explained. "We haven't coin to put all of us up at an inn. This is the best of our choices."

Nodding his acceptance, Alistair helped Sten cart the trunk containing Weylon's remains to the pyre outside the city. Rìona set Leliana and Wynne to reading Genitivi's research while she sat with Zevran and listened to his report. Her surmise that the Cousland manor in Denerim was housing Howe's men had been accurate. Though his voice was sympathetic, Zevran did not spare her the details of how badly kept and abused the stately manor home was, nor did he stint to tell her the sort of activities Howe's men were up to. The servants who had worked so loyally for the Cousland family were now little more than slaves to Howe's hired thugs, theoretically imprisoned for having aided and abetted the "traitorous" Cousland clan. Human and elf alike—for the Couslands had hired both and paid them the same scrupulously fair wages—they now served unwillingly as scullions and bedsport for any brutal goon in Howe's employ with an itch to scratch.

How such a thing was permitted in Ferelden, a nation which had—in theory, at least, though she knew plenty of Alienage elves would argue the point and with good cause—always disdained the institution of slavery, was incomprehensible.

Her fists were clenched and her eyes shining with tears by the time Zevran had finished his report.

"This fellow Howe sounds like the sort of man we should kill, yes?" Zevran offered by way of comfort.

She gave a watery chuckle, refusing to allow herself to dwell upon the fact that Zevran could likely find a way to get at the Arl of Denerim, if she asked him to do so. But that wasn't the way she would mete justice to Rendon Howe. No assassin's blade from the shadows would do.

No. It must be delivered at her own hands.

"Yes, indeed. Alas, we have no hope of getting to him, now, especially with Loghain apparently coddling him. We must flush him out, and that is not our purpose here in Denerim at present. I'm willing to stay my vengeance for the time, but believe me, Howe will die upon the Cousland blade. I swore it to my parents, and it will be done."

"Tch! Too bad," Zevran shook his head in mock dismay. "It's been too long since I slipped a dagger silently between someone's ribs. These battles you fight are too straightforward! You run in, you stab things, they die. There is no artistry in it, _sí?_ I shall begin to lose some of my skills if I don't keep in practice. Though actually, now that I mention my skills..."

"Yes?" Rìona didn't particularly like herself for bracing the way that she did. She wasn't certain what it said about her that she could share her tent with Zevran every night, let him have her every way it was possible for a man to possess a woman, but still get so nervous at the reminder that he was an assassin hired to kill her.

"Ah!" Zevran laughed, spreading his empty hands before her. "You should see the look on your face, _mi Guardiana bonita_. Have no fear. I have not decided to turn my back on the oath of loyalty I swore and finish the contract the Crows accepted on you. I merely wanted to ask just how desperate for coin we are. In my explorations today, I stumbled upon some interesting opportunities, if one isn't all that fastidious about following the law."

"Hmm. Are they discreet opportunities? With the city guard in such chaos I'm not all that concerned about getting caught, but I wouldn't want to give the mill of Loghain's slander any more grist."

He flashed a grin at her. "You surprise me, Warden! I was half-expecting you to reject the notion out of hand."

Rìona shrugged. "I've a bounty on my head already for supposedly betraying the king; should he catch me, I doubt Loghain will be able to stretch my neck any further for the sake of a few petty crimes. We shall not deprive those in need, however, and they are many in this city."

"Understood," Zevran nodded. "There are men you may be interested in meeting, then, in the marketplace. One in particular seems to bear a grudge against the nobility. After supper we shall seek them out, yes?"

Sten and Alistair returned from delivering Weylon's body to the pyre. No one had so much as questioned them, a fact which made Rìona shake her head in wonder, for surely someone should have questioned Sten carrying bodies out of the city. How many Tal'Vashoth mercenaries were there in the city that their presence didn't at least raise eyebrows? Alistair remarked that he had overheard some people in the street talking about a possible plague—maybe even the Blight sickness—in the Alienage, which had been closed off after some rioting had broken out that had resulted in the death of Arl Urien Kendalls' son. The human population, including the guard, feared a spread of the contagion and gave anyone hauling corpses to the pyre a very wide berth.

They also, Zevran interjected, feared running afoul of Arl Howe's new elite guard, most of whom were more villainous than the criminals they were meant to catch. Which made it unwise to ask too many questions, or pay too much attention to shady dealings even when they happened in broad daylight.

"No wonder crime is so rampant in the city," Rìona scoffed. "The gangs of back alley thugs have license to murder nearly anyone without consequence! Andraste's mercy! Where is Queen Anora while all this happens at her very doorstep? Denerim used to be the teyrnir of the king, and the Arl of Denerim was once appointed by, and is still accountable to, the crown. Loghain may be managing military affairs as regent, but that does not mean Anora has no authority. She is still the queen, and her voice still has weight. It falls to her to make certain the Arl of Denerim is doing his job. There's absolutely no excuse for her not to be tending to matters within the city. Has she done aught to ensure the city has food stores for the influx of refugees? Tended to matters of public sanitation for the encampment at the gates? Taken measures to reduce crime within the city so that the weak are not preyed upon? Maker's blood, what is she doing with herself while Loghain attempts to strong-arm the whole of the Bannorn into compliance? My father and his compatriots and even Cailan himself all called her a capable queen, but I'm seeing little evidence of that fact."

Rìona left them, then, to sit in Brother Genitivi's study listening with half an ear to Wynne and Leliana discussing the brother's notes and writings, but meanwhile her mind paced sullenly back and forth across a path of resentment. Zevran tactfully left her to her own musings, but Alistair braved her glower and sat beside her, asking her what was the matter.

"I'm troubled by all this," she answered, shaking her head. "From the time I took my first steps, my parents impressed upon me the fact that _in Ferelden_, being born of nobility means being accountable to the common people who grant us the power so that we might protect them in times of war. They pay us taxes, not to maintain us in luxury and decadence, but so that we might arm and train troops to defend their freeholds."

Rìona turned an inquiring look upon him. "Do you know that during the Orlesian occupation, the Grand Cleric actually tried to tell us the Maker _made_ Meghren the Usurper king? That it was his divine right. But King Maric and the men like my father who followed him, they knew better. The Maker grants us no special privilege or authority to rule over others. If the people defer to us and grant us a certain measure of respect, it is because they know that when it is time for war, it will be _our_ blood shed on _their_ behalf. And that is why Maric elevated Loghain to the teyrnir of Gwaren, because by tradition, a teyrn is a warlord beyond all else." She sighed, looking down at her knees. "The occupation... I fear ending it is not accomplished merely by driving out the the occupiers."

Alistair frowned. "I'm not sure I understand what you mean."

"The Orlesians were here for nearly a century. Some of their culture... it has become a part of us, the mindset they brought with them, the assumption that privilege, rather than duty, comes with noble birth."

She swung her hand on a wide, encompassing arc. "Look around. What Denerim has become, what some of the nobility have become... it is not _Fereldan_. This is how Orlais manages their affairs; ignoring the plight of the common folk for the squabbles of the nobility. Every rumor we've heard has Loghain poised to take up arms against the bannorn to wrest from them supplies and troops he has no right under Fereldan law to demand. Even if his claim to the regency were legitimate, it is he who is answerable to the Landsmeet, not the other way around. _That_ is Fereldan custom. Neither Arl Howe nor Queen Anora are troubling themselves with the very real suffering of the common folk right here in Denerim, and Howe's men are behaving with an attitude of entitlement worse than the chevaliers."

"Then we stop them," Alistair said firmly. "Whatever it takes. We return Ferelden to Fereldans."

"If we can," Rìona muttered morosely. "But I fear a mentality is not so easily slain as an enemy. Many of the Fereldan nobility who died when King Maric drove out the Orlesians died upon Maric's own blade for collaborating. Why would they have collaborated, if not for the fact that ultimately, the Orlesian way suited their self-interests? I just... even if such an insidious attitude did begin to pervade Ferelden's nobility, I would have thought Loghain and Anora of all people would have been beyond it, that they would never assume privilege by right of rank and eschew the obligation to answer to the Landsmeet and the common folk that ought to come with it. What they are doing, what they are allowing, makes no sense. They ought to know better."

Alistair nodded and Rìona fell silent. She could not find the words to tell him that she herself might have been part of the problem. More keenly than ever did she feel the fact that she had not taken her responsibility to lead her people in time of war seriously. She had learned archery because some degree of martial skill had been a requirement laid down by her parents. But she never had any great passion for warfare and had settled for being a passable fighter rather than an exemplary one. She considered the traditional role of warlord to be a throwback to a more barbaric time, thought herself a different, more modern breed of noblewoman, a diplomat first and foremost. She'd never imagined a situation where she couldn't negotiate or charm or seduce someone to her achieve her ends. But she couldn't seduce the archdemon or negotiate with the Blight, and now here she was, leading a troop of fighters while being herself possessed of no extraordinary skill at arms.

But she'd never forgotten, or taken for granted, her obligation to the banns and freeholders sworn to her. On that point, at least, she could exonerate herself.

After supper, Rìona stepped outside to await Zevran to meet with the people in the marketplace he had mentioned, only to find Alistair standing on the doorstep, staring at a small, slightly decrepit house across the square.

"Alistair?"

"Hm? Sorry, I was... thinking."

"Is there something especially intriguing about that house over there? You were looking at it particularly closely when you came back with Sten, also."

He looked at her, blushing, then glanced away and cleared his throat. "I... hm. Um... I think my sister lives there."

"Your sister?" Rìona's mouth dropped open in disbelief. "Maker's breath! Why have you not mentioned this before?"

"You, um... you've been occupied with other things. And these past few weeks, sometimes there's been a lot of tension between us. I wasn't sure you—"

"Wasn't sure I'd what? Be thrilled for you that you have some family remaining? Of course I am, Alistair." She forced herself to ignore the spark of envy in her heart or the sting in her eyes, thanking Andraste that it was dark and Alistair couldn't see as she blinked rapidly. "Tell me about her."

It turned out he'd never met his sister, Goldanna, nor did he know whether she knew about him. He'd only learned about her from the talk of the servants in Redcliffe castle, who had said Alistair's mother had had another child who had gone to live in Denerim after his mother died bearing him. He found himself torn between a strong desire to meet her, to attempt to make a connection, and a fear of the unknown reality such an action would entail.

"Still, I should warn her about the Blight," he shrugged. "If I didn't, and something happened to her..."

"Of course you must go to see her," Rìona said decisively. "You'd be a fool to waste such an opportunity. Go tonight, now. There should be time, you've got nothing else you need do tonight. Wynne and Leliana will be poring over Brother Genitivi's papers for days, perhaps, and Zevran and I were simply going to go speak with some people who might be hiring help of a... less savory nature."

"Do we have so little coin that such a thing will be necessary?" he asked with a troubled frown, but there was no accusation in his words.

"I'm not certain." It was Rìona's turn to shrug. "Conditions here in the city are much worse than I had anticipated. The supplies we need will be costly. I'd rather have the coin and not need it than need it and not have it. After all, this will not be the last time we need to re-provision ourselves, and we'll only be in Denerim this once."

"I understand," Alistair said, nodding with a sigh of resignation. "We do what we must, right?"

Rìona gave him a small smile. "Come. There's no time like the present. I'll tell Zevran to wait a moment before we leave on our errand and walk you across the square."

As they approached Goldanna's house, Alistair began temporizing and coming up excuses not to go in, and so Rìona agreed to accompany him.

She quickly wished she hadn't.

She was surprised to see the woman who answered their rap at the door. Goldanna's hair was a coppery shade, redder than Alistair's own burnished gold plait, and the sharp refinement of her features suggested she might be elf-blooded. Rìona had known Alistair's mother was a servant at Redcliffe castle, but nothing about his form or features suggested elven blood. There was no time to wonder on the political implications of that fact, however, before Alistair's sister began to speak. She was curt to the point of being rude, and the situation didn't improve when Alistair haltingly explained that they weren't there to drop off linens to be washed and told her who he was.

"Them at the castle told me you was dead!" she exclaimed, with an impolite and accusatory point of her finger. Her jaw dropped in a manner that was almost as unbecoming as her rough speech. "You and me mother. Give me a gold coin and sent me on my way, they did!"

"No, I'm not. Dead, that is," Alistair stammered. His gentle uncertainty and earnestness made something in Rìona's chest ache in sympathy for him. "I'm alive. I'm here. I'm... your brother."

"And what good does that do me?" The laundress sneered. "You and your father killed me mother and left me to fend for meself."

"I... I don't... I _didn't_..." Alistair's voice trailed away weakly, and he looked helplessly at Rìona.

Rìona struggled for a voice of calm reason, though everything about the woman's manner rankled. "Alistair can hardly be held responsible for that. He came here because you're his family. He wants to know you."

But his sister would not be swayed. She knew Alistair's father had been the king, and every attempt to speak with her kept coming back to the fact that she mistakenly assumed Alistair had been living in luxury his whole life while she barely scrounged a living doing laundry until her hands bled.

She didn't want a brother, she wanted money. Alistair's claim that he was a Grey Warden only made her more certain that he had funds to part with.

"I don't have much. Anything, really," he insisted miserably. "I just wanted to warn you about the Blight. Can you get out of the country?"

"Do I look like I can afford passage to the Free Marches?" she demanded scathingly. "With the damned refugees flooding the city, every other farmwife with a bucket's taking in wash these days. I can barely feed _your_ five nieces and nephews."

"Oh, Maker," Alistair groaned. He looked absolutely wretched as he gazed at Rìona, and she knew what he intended to ask before he said it. "Is there any way we can help them? Maybe... fifteen sovereigns?"

Rìona closed her eyes and clenched her jaw. The last thing she wanted to do was part with so much as a single copper of their precious coin for the sake of this termagant. Fifteen sovereigns was nearly half of their total funds. It would be impossible to make up the loss and get out of Denerim in a timely manner.

But she was Alistair's family. Unfortunate as that fact might have been, Rìona knew that if he _didn't_ aid Goldanna and she died in the Blight, Alistair would never forgive himself. Or Rìona, if she denied his request.

Sighing, she removed her purse from her belt and counted out the coins he had requested.

"Is that all you've got for your family?" the woman demanded, practically snapping the money up from Alistair's outstretched hand. "If that's it, then get out and don't come back until you've told those high and mighty folk you know that you've a family who aren't living as they ought to."

"Come on, Alistair. Let's go. There's nothing for you here," Rìona said, glaring at the harpy. Somehow she managed to usher him out the door before she succumbed to her own urge to draw more blood than that woman's flaying tongue had managed to do. Once they were out in the cold air of the darkened marketplace, Alistair slumped unhappily against the wall of the armorer's shop next door.

"That's... not what I expected," he said after a long moment.

"I'm sorry, Alistair."

He shook his head in bewilderment. "All I wanted was some family. Someone. Not a gold-digging harridan like that. I'm sorry I gave her anything. I'll make up the loss, I promise. I'll take on as many odd jobs as it takes. I won't even complain if some of them are... _shady._ I'll even work for the Mages' Collective ,if you want."

Another time, Rìona might have smiled at that. Her insistence upon taking jobs for the organization of apostate mages had been a consistent problem between them, for he feared what the Chantry might do to them if they learned of it.

"The loss of the coin has hurt us, it's true," Rìona said softly. "But I'm more worried about you. Alistair, you _must_ begin to protect yourself. You can't keep your parentage a secret for much longer, traipsing around Ferelden wearing that Theirin face of yours. People are going to begin to recognize what that means and they'll take advantage of you if you don't guard against it. They're out for themselves. You need to be, also."

There was something dangerous in the gleam of his eyes when he lifted them to look at her, glowing golden in the flickering light of the torches that lined the marketplace square.

"Do what I want and hang everyone else, is that it?" he asked, and though his voice was quiet, there was something in it, a soft menace that made Rìona's pulse leap. He pushed himself up and away from the rough wooden wall, suddenly towering over Rìona and standing far too close.

"Do what you need to do to take care of yourself, and hang everyone else," she corrected, dismayed to find her voice was unsteady.

"Is that what you're doing with Zevran in your tent every night?" Again, his words were soft, but Rìona found herself backing up a step. He advanced, refusing to let her gain some distance.

"Yes." She lifted her chin stubbornly. She supposed she could have elaborated, told him why she needed Zevran, but that would come too close to defending herself and she would not apologize to him for that. "That's precisely what I do with Zevran in my tent every night."

She didn't know she had retreated another step until suddenly her back was to the wall of Goldanna's house and she was cornered, blocked by his broad, imposing form. Why she suddenly felt like a rabbit in a snare she couldn't say, except that this unrelenting advance was not what she had come to expect of him.

Before she even had time to comprehend what was happening or how he had suddenly become the aggressor, his mouth was covering hers. There was no shyness or hesitation, no request for permission. He _took_ the kiss from her, hungrily, unrelentingly, demanding her mouth open to the sweep of his tongue.

She did.

If she'd held any hope that what they had stumbled upon together in the Harrowing chamber had been a fluke borne of a mad moment of desperation, it was utterly destroyed by that kiss. It shook her to her very marrow, and suddenly she was a mass of desire for something that went far beyond sex. The longing to be closer to him, to surround and be surrounded by him, was a physical ache. She wanted to lose herself in that kiss, in his nearness.

Her arms slid up and around his neck, drawing him down further. Her fingers stroked what little skin his chainmail left exposed. She needed to touch him, taste him, feel him. She arched and yearned closer to him, molding her body to his where he pinned her against the rough wall of the house, whimpering when his thigh pressed between hers.

He wrenched his mouth away from hers with a groan and rested his forehead against the splintery wooden planks above her shoulder. He trembled, and she knew that whatever she was experiencing, she was not alone in it.

"I think about you every moment," he whispered urgently, the words tumbling from his mouth in a desperate rush. "I hear you and Zevran at night and I—Maker! Sometimes I think I must be going mad with wanting you."

She thought of that moment in the woods when she had chanced upon him pleasuring himself and the _wanting_ that came with the memory was nearly painful.

How she found the strength to speak, to deny him, she would never know.

"Stop, Alistair," she gasped. "This isn't what you want."

"It is!" he insisted, pressing a open-mouthed kiss to her neck. Her knees turned to water. "I don't want you to be with Zevran. I want you to be with me."

"You don't," Rìona said, closing her eyes against a sharp, cramping pang of arousal. "I'm a degenerate harlot, remember?"

"No..." Alistair shook his head in denial, his face still buried in the crook of her neck.

"_Yes_. You want comfort now, a connection to someone, something to salve the ache of rejection. You don't want _me_. You don't want all that I am. You don't want a woman who can take pleasure without affection anywhere she deems it necessary and who carries another man's bastard babe. You'll never be able to truly accept all that."

He stilled immediately, shuddering against her. Frozen with indecision, he waited there, his breath harsh against her ear. Then slowly, he drew away.

"No," he said finally, not meeting her eyes. "You're right. I... can't."

Rìona practically moaned in despair when he retreated from her.

"I'm sorry," he muttered, and turned, stalking away from her across the market square to Brother Genitivi's house. Rìona stood there, shivering with far more than the cold. It was some time before she finally felt collected enough to face Zevran.

He was standing outside Genitivi's house, waiting. "Our templar just went storming inside. Everything is well?"

"No," she answered with an emphatic shake of her head. Everything within her was a dangerous mass of longing, aching to be filled. She wasn't certain if she wanted passion or violence, but whatever it was, she needed something to still the tumult. "Not even a little bit well. Come on. Let's see about these jobs. We suddenly find ourselves in need of considerably more coin than before."

Silly me, so used to having my way; I couldn't contain my surprise.  
Funny me, so used to knowing what to say; I couldn't remain in  
Something that would suffocate my passion and kill my pride.  
"Projector" by Casey Stratton


	25. Chapter Twenty Five: Need

(Content Warning: Consensual BDSM-Domination/submission and whipping.)

Their days in Denerim spun onward, nearly a week, and with each sunset Rìona grew more restless. The longer they tarried in Denerim, the greater their chances were of being captured by Loghain and Howe's men. That they had escaped notice thus far was due in large part to the collaboration of the city guard and—of all things—the Antivan Crows.

Rìona had approached the the beleaguered Sergeant Kylon of the city guard after witnessing a refugee get robbed before her very eyes in an alley off the market district. Rìona had been slipping through the alley, practicing her ability to hide in shadows, and only her timely intervention with a few well-placed arrows had saved the poor girl's life. One bandit had died, but the surviving thugs had managed to escape—some limping—with the purse containing every meager coin the girl had possessed. The girl had been hysterical, uncertain how she would survive with no coin and, when Rìona had left her, she'd been sobbing that she would have been better off staying on her freehold in the Southron Hills to be claimed by the Blight than coming to the Maker-forsaken city of Denerim. But worst of all had been the fact that around the corner, two of Howe's elite guard had stood, hearing and laughing about the girl's cries and doing nothing to aid her.

The sergeant had known who Rìona was immediately; he'd noticed her the day she entered the city, in fact. Howe had passed around a description and likeness of her to his own men and senior members of the city guard. Kylon was no coward, but he was well aware of the Grey Wardens' purported skill at arms. In addition, his dislike and mistrust where Arl Howe was concerned made him loathe to attempt to apprehend her, particularly since he was unlikely to receive any aid from the incompetent guardsmen he was charged with commanding. Apparently Howe was currying favor with the bannorn willing to consider Loghain's usurpation of the regency legitimate by trading services, such as giving their acknowledged bastards employment with the city guard in exchange for votes in the Landsmeet. The effect was that the guard was now utterly useless as a peacekeeping and security force.

All this, Kylon explained with a dry wit that Rìona found delightful. His rant about how his guardsmen would run and "cry big, sobby tears into their courtesans' bosoms", if he asked them to undertake any task that might be considered dangerous, had her laughing until she was slumped against a wall, breathless. She struck up a guarded friendship with the overworked sergeant and in exchange for her help with a few of the more deadly tasks that fell to his responsibility—the ones for which he could not rely on his own men—he agreed to keep her presence in the city a secret and not attempt to arrest her or any of her company.

She supposed her association with the Sergeant Kylon was odd, considering she was simultaneously undertaking a number of jobs that were quite illegal, such as breaking into a warehouse and pilfering funds Arl Howe was stealing from the treasury. Nevertheless, she found in him a secret and potentially valuable ally in her despite of Arl Rendon Howe. Which had made it all the more entertaining to employ Leliana's bard-born skills at larceny—sadly, Zevran had exaggerated his own abilities in this area—to steal from the inn room of Howe's supposed mistress. Not to mention a number of other noble targets who had thrown in their lot with Howe and Loghain.

But it was her cooperation with the Antivan Crows that was perhaps the most bizarre development of their sojourn in Denerim. She had been in Denerim three days when Master Ignacio, an Antivan merchant from the marketplace, approached her with an offer. Her assistance with certain jobs, in exchange for his considerable influence exerted on her behalf, to prevent the Crows from accepting any further contracts on her life beside the one that had already been taken. That one, which Zevran had failed to fulfill, could not be canceled until the master Crow who had accepted it was dead.

In order to prove his _bona fides_, Master Ignacio had passed a particularly interesting contract to her. One of Howe's men, by the name of Paedan, was wanted dead for killing a wealthy merchant's son to cancel a gaming debt Paedan owed the lad. That, in and of itself, wasn't enough to persuade Rìona to hire her company's services as assassins, until Master Ignacio shared what his people had discovered in their efforts to track Paedan down to fulfill the contract. Apparently, Howe's man had laid a trap with the intention of silencing supporters of the Grey Wardens, luring them to a private meeting and disposing of them quietly, to prevent anyone contesting Loghain's claims of the Grey Wardens' complicity in King Cailan's death.

Despite Zevran's misgivings, Rìona had accepted the contract and now Paedan would no longer be silencing Grey Warden supporters. That particular job didn't pay, however. It simply established Master Ignacio's goodwill toward Rìona and demonstrated to her the benefits of a reciprocal arrangement. Rìona had agreed.

Unfortunately, even with all the work they had taken on—and they had spent days clearing out back alley gangs for the Chantry and hunting down the relatives of blood mages to issue warnings against such activity on behalf of the Mages' Collective—they were still lacking the coin they needed to fully provision themselves.

And the situation had just become worse.

"Where is this village—Haven—located?" Rìona had asked when Wynne announced that she had found some indication of Brother Genitivi's true destination.

"He indicates it's in the Frostback Mountains, some days west of Redcliffe," Wynne answered with a troubled frown.

Rìona groaned in dismay, closing her eyes. "Maker's balls!"

"What's the matter?" Alistair asked, confusion furrowing his brow. "We have to head back that way, anyway, to return to Redcliffe. It's just a little out of our way."

"It's a climb into the mountains in the middle of what is turning out to be a brutal winter."

"Even such provisions as I have managed to acquire for us will not be sufficient in such conditions," Morrigan stated and Rìona nodded in agreement.

"And our only other alternative is to wait for spring and hope Arl Eamon's condition proves unchanged," she added, rising to pace Genitivi's cramped study. "He's our best hope for standing against Loghain. Bann Teagan is a respected voice in the Landsmeet, but he lacks Eamon's influence and Teagan does not command Eamon's troops. Andraste's mercy. This is going to add weeks to our travels and increase what we need to spend for winter clothing and other gear."

Alistair looked wounded at that, and Rìona felt bad for bringing it up. He was keenly regretting his generosity with his sister, now that he understood how little coin there was to be had doing odd jobs around Denerim. In the week they had been there, they'd barely made up the loss. There were other jobs which would take them out of Denerim, but payment would not be delivered until they returned with the job completed.

It wasn't enough. It wasn't close to enough.

"I'll see if Sergeant Kylon has any more work for us," Rìona sighed after a moment. "I'll... figure something out. Excuse me."

She left before they could see her despair, before it could have an effect on their morale. That much she knew about leading people, for it had been one of the lessons on authority, both in battle and simply in managing an estate, that her parents had imparted. She must always take care to inspire confidence in others and never let them see her doubt herself.

She was failing. If she took her company into the mountains again without enough warm clothing, they might die. But the Urn was their last hope, a foolish, wild, desperate hope at that, of healing Arl Eamon. They had to follow Genitivi. It was their only chance.

The rumors she was hearing on the streets, and in the taverns and inns, were getting worse. Now two months into Loghain's regency, battles were starting to break out as the bannorn set to resisting Loghain's levies for troops and provisions and Loghain attempted to force them into compliance. Rìona wasn't certain if it was better or worse that he appeared to be keeping his mercenaries in reserve for fighting the darkspawn; the Fereldan men of the Bannorn were falling to Fereldan blades. Bann Bronach was apparently dead, and there wasn't a count of the men lost in that particular battle. Rumor had it that over a thousand men had been on the field.

Loghain was tearing Ferelden apart.

There wouldn't be men enough to battle the Blight if this continued. How many more Fereldan men and women would fall fighting one another if she waited until spring thawed the mountain snows to attempt to heal Arl Eamon? How many would be left to battle the Blight?

She needed Eamon now. Perhaps he could negotiate a truce between Loghain and the bannorn, pending a Landsmeet to decide the legitimacy of Loghain's regency. If anyone had the influence to do so, the Arl of Redcliffe, uncle to the late king, did.

"You are troubled, my Warden?" She turned to look at Zevran, who had slipped into the alley behind Genitivi's house, quiet as a cat, while she was lost in her thoughts.

"Yes," she nodded slowly, but didn't elaborate. Zevran knew well enough what their situation meant.

He came up behind her and she felt his breath on the back of her neck, his lips brushing. It felt good. Her knees wanted to unlock, her weight wanted to sag against him as she forgot herself in the pleasure of being touched.

Instead she pulled away. "No, there's not time. I must do something, anything. I must do _more._"

When she looked at Zevran, he was smiling. "I have no desire to keep you from doing what you must, _querida_, but my role here in this company is two-fold, yes? We have discussed this before."

"Yes."

"Then allow me to ease your burden."

Maker help her, she ought to be staid enough to refuse, to carry on without the crutch he offered. But she wasn't.

"Here in the alley?" she asked, only half-joking. Her eyebrow lifted inquisitively.

"Would you like that?" Zevran's smile grew predatory as he drew nearer, and Rìona retreated a few steps. "I could do it. Ahh, I could bend you over those barrels there and take you, not even bothering to remove our clothing beyond the necessities. I could bury myself deep within you out here in full daylight, where anyone might chance upon us and see, drawn by your cries of pleasure. Perhaps even the plain-faced sergeant whose humor charms you so. Just think of it, Warden. Think of taking him into your oh-so-talented mouth and bestowing your gratitude for his consideration until his seed coats your tongue while I have you before his eyes."

Her back was to the wall of Genitivi's house. He had trapped her, and he showed no inclination to let her go. His hand slipped up under her war skirt and unlaced the leather ties of her groin covering, taking it from her and tucking it into his belt pouch while the fingers of his other hand worked their way under her linen smallclothes.

"Maker, Zevran!" Rìona moaned, her head falling back as her entire body went rigid with pleasure at his touch. She had thought she knew how to seduce with words, but she was merely a talented amateur compared to him.

"I can see the idea pleases you," Zevran said, his deadly smile a blur in her vision as he stood practically nose-to-nose with her and brought her to the brink with skillful strokes. The glide of his fingers was an exquisitely slick torment on her sensitive flesh. "Is that what you crave? Surrender? To let go the mantle of authority awhile?"

"Yes," she whimpered, closing her eyes tightly against the sudden burn of tears and shame. It was a weakness, and yet she needed it, the surrender he offered.

He ripped away her smallclothes, the rending of the linen cloth a startling snarl in the silent alley. Rìona flinched and began to protest, for even linen for undergarments was an expenditure, but he silenced her with a hand to her mouth.

"Do not question," he said, and there was a menace in his voice, a hint of dire recompense if she should disobey. "You know as well as I do that the expense of replacing those is but a trifle compared to all we must do. A copper or two, no more. And even if it weren't, you must trust that I shall attend to what you need, yes?"

Rìona swallowed hard and nodded, and in the next instant Zevran's fingers were plunging inside her.

"I did not hear you, Warden."

Rìona gasped. "Yes!" Her hips moved of their own volition, seeking more. Sleeping on bedrolls on the floor of Genitivi's modest house lacked even the illusion of privacy afforded by a tent, and so she and Zevran had not lain together since their arrival in Denerim. Her entire body thrummed a need born of deprivation.

"Very good," he purred. His fingers withdrew from her, leaving her feeling cold and exposed. He pressed against her, the full length of his body, and kissed her, slowly, deeply, thoroughly. He nibbled and sucked and pulled at her lips, plundered her mouth with his tongue, until Rìona could barely recall her name, much less her troubles, or the fact that it was cold in the dingy alley. Her lips tingled and felt bruised when Zevran finally released her.

"Go inside and get your cloak. We are going out for the day and I do not expect we shall return until quite late."

"Where—?"

"Ah! Did I not just say not to question?"

"But—"

He smiled again, and it was a smile to be deeply afraid of. "And for that there shall be a punishment, later. Let's go."

She bit her tongue as she was on the verge of asking what he intended her to do for smallclothes and proceeded him inside the house.

Like everything in Denerim, woolens were scarce and expensive. Morrigan had been forced to get more creative in her efforts to locate the items they needed, and so she had begun purchasing cloaks from refugees whose loved ones had died of privation outside the city gates. There were not enough to go around, yet, and they would need to buy an extra one in order to sew together a longer, wider cloak for Sten, but it was a start.

Rìona had laid claim to the most tattered and threadbare of the lot, and when she wasn't poring over Brother Genitivi's papers, Wynne was industriously lining the cloaks with the tanned furs they had traded for. She made a ridiculous sight in hers, Rìona was certain, but it would serve its purpose.

Alistair's gaze took in her heavy eyelids and swollen lips, and then he turned away, his shoulders hunched. Her voice wasn't very firm as she explained that she and Zevran would be going out to look for more work, but no one asked any unnecessary questions. They agreed to complete another sweep of the back alleys to make certain the gangs had been culled, and then Rìona followed Zevran out into the streets.

Their destination surprised her.

"The Pearl?" she blurted before she remembered she was not to ask any questions. Their business had brought them to the brothel before, on behalf of both the Antivan Crows and the city guard, so she was not unfamiliar with the place. She just couldn't fathom why Zevran would bring her here. It wasn't as though they had spare coin to hire a whore.

Zevran gave her a chastening look and led her past the stoop to the brothel and around the corner of the building. Once again she found herself pressed up against a wall. Between him and Alistair, it was practically becoming a habit, she thought tartly.

At least it was warm, enveloped between his cloak and hers.

"I think, Warden, you need a little lesson on the rules of the game."

"What are you—?" her words trailed off when he began unlacing the leather cod-flap of his breeches above his own long leather boots. His erection sprang free, and she reached for it eagerly, grateful for the chance to ease the frustrated buzz that had been plaguing her ever since they had left Genitivi's house. But Zevran caught her hands and pushed them away, pinning them by her head.

"Here. Your hands do not move," he instructed. Grabbing one of her knees, he lifted it up around his hip, the stiff stitching of his leather armor rubbing roughly against her soft inner thigh. And then his hard length was prodding at her entrance. With a smooth, effortless motion, Zevran grabbed her beneath her backside and lifted her the few inches necessary. Her legs went instinctively around his waist and he guided himself into her with a single firm thrust.

"Maker's breath!" she gasped, her eyes snapping shut as her head slammed back against the wall of the brothel.

Zevran set a demanding pace, hammering into her, drawing urgent groans and cries from her lips despite her attempts to be quiet. He made no effort to kiss her or stroke her, and with her hands beside her head, her sensitive nub was achingly ignored.

"The rules are these: today your body, and your will, belong to me."

His words made her spasm, the tension within her belly painfully, unbearably tight.

"Zevran, _please_," Rìona moaned.

"You do not question. You do not hesitate. If I wish to have you in the middle of the market square, you will take me gladly within you and cry out your pleasure for the whole of Denerim to hear. If I wish you to pleasure another, you will use your mouth, your ass, your sweet—" _thrust_ "—little—" _thrust_ "—cunt, at my command. Your only job is to obey."

"Zevran, I'm...oh, _Maker_, Zevran, please, I'm so close..."

"No, Warden," he said almost tenderly. "I am afraid you are not."

Zevran ripped himself away from her, taking his slick, shining length in hand. With just a few strokes, he spent himself on the wall at her feet before she could catch her breath or move. Rìona stared at him in disbelief as he opened his eyes.

"You Maker-forsaken son of a whore!" she breathed, feeling ridiculously near tears.

"This is true," he said mildly. "I am all that and more. And you, dear Warden, will not have your pleasure until you learn to obey." He reached for her hand where it still rested beside her head as she slumped, aching with unfulfilled arousal. He brought her fingers to his face, breathing deeply. "And if I detect even the slightest whiff of quim on these lovely fingers, you shall suffer terribly indeed."

Casually he laced up his cod-flap again and turned, walking away from her, requiring Rìona to scramble to keep up. She was practically limping, her unsatisfied need an actual cramping pain that threatened to double her over for a moment. "Come. There is someone within you should meet."

She glared at him, ready to call the whole thing off. But he looked at her, a challenge in her eyes, and she recalled the way it had felt outside Genitivi's house when he offered her a chance for surrender. Drawing a deep breath, she followed him inside.

The Pearl was lavish, and though times were hard, there was always a bustling business being done. The whores, who to Rìona's delight deemed themselves a craft guild and took pride in their work, ranged from demure and tastefully dressed to scantily clad and bawdy, drinking and flirting enthusiastically with the patrons.

Seeing them, Rìona mused softly, "I've always wondered what it would be like to be a whore. My mother didn't like to speak of her time at the brothel."

"My dear Warden," he laughed, taking her cloak, "we are all whores. Some of us are just more frank about the currency we accept, yes?"

"Yes, well that is precisely what makes me wonder... to be so open about bartering sex, no motivation or angle more complicated than the need for mere coin."

"And why would this, of all things, intrigue you?"

"It seems it might be liberating, in a way," she answered, frowning. "No need to maneuver or seduce or cajole. A simple transaction, pleasure is had, and it's over."

"Ah, _dulcita_, you betray your youth with your idealism," he sighed. "For the whore, pleasure is far from guaranteed, especially when the option of refusing no longer exists. The liberty you assume is rarely present."

"I suppose that's true," she nodded. "Pay me no mind. It's an immaterial point, anyway."

Zevran took her not to the proprietress, Sanga, but to a back corner of the bar area, where a striking woman sat alone at a table. Rìona recognized her, vaguely. She had been engaged in a rather one-sided brawl with several men the last time their business had brought them to the Pearl. Zevran seemed to know the woman, though he'd not mentioned it before.

"There are two things I at which I excel, Warden. Killing is the other. Sometimes the two coincide, and meeting the woman I am about to introduce to you was one of those times. She makes my own skill seem paltry in comparison."

Confused, Rìona studied the woman as she rose and greeted Zevran, bantering with him about his having killed her husband—a fact over which she seemed to cherish no actual ill-will. Apparently she had inherited a ship out of the deal, and Rìona quickly deduced her to be a smuggler, or a pirate.

"Warden, allow me to introduce Isabela, the fastest blade in Llomerryn. Isabela, you will no doubt be amused to know I am traveling with a Grey Warden."

"A Grey Warden?" The captain's eyes widened a little and her brow lifted as she took in Rìona, letting her eyes slowly stroke her from head to foot and back again. "Interesting."

"The Warden is outstanding with a bow, but she lacks skill in close-quarters combat," Zevran said casually, ignoring Rìona's indignant glower. "It hadn't been my intention to approach you when I saw you here in Denerim, Isabela, then I thought, 'who better to teach her?'"

Rìona opened her mouth to protest, but Zevran's eyes glinted as he glanced sidewise at her, and she realized he was daring her to question him. She bit down on her lip hard to stifle the impulse.

"I... saw your fight the other day against those men," she said instead, struggling to assume an attitude of modesty that did not come naturally to her. "I've never seen anything like it."

"And you want to learn." The pirate studied her for another long moment, then looked at Zevran. "You know I prefer to know my students better."

"The Warden lacks your talent at cards, but she has other skills you would find much more entertaining."

"I see," Isabela hummed thoughtfully. "How could I possibly turn down such a _delicious_ offer?"

They wound up going down to the docks, to Isabela's ship, _The Siren's Call_. The woman's crew treated her with awe and deference, and when they discovered she had brought aboard a pupil, they cleared a space on the foredeck, moving enormous coils of hemp rope and buckets of sand aside. Only half her crew was actually on board, Rìona learned. The others were ashore, taking in their fill of the pleasures to be had on dry land, before Isabela set sail with the intention of putting Ferelden and the Blight as far behind her as possible.

Those that were still manning the ship gathered to watch the show, and Rìona was certain they got their share of entertainment, especially since Rìona was wearing no smallclothes and wound up sprawled on her back with Isabela's dagger at her throat countless times. Between the training and the rolling of the ship, she found herself unbalanced and awkward. The fundamentals of Isabela's fighting style should have been at least somewhat familiar, for Rìona had been trained to daggers herself even if she'd never been all that enthusiastic a pupil, but it wasn't. The woman moved unlike anything Rìona had ever seen, always just managing _not_ to be where her opponent's blade fell. Quickly, Rìona began to discern the advantages of the style, not only for fighting with daggers but also as an archer. If she became more skillful at evading attack, that—along with Zevran's attempts to teach her stealth and the art of remaining concealed from her opponents—would go a long way towards relieving Alistair and Sten of the burden of defending her.

Morning wore into afternoon, and if Rìona had ever thought her weapons-master back in Highever merciless, she was entirely mistaken. When Isabela tired, Zevran took over, and back and forth they traded training with her, while Rìona grew more and more weary. They barked orders and slid home smoothly witty insults like daggers' blades between her ribs. They dissected every nuance of her fighting form; her grip on her daggers, her stance, the placement of her feet and the way she balanced herself, nothing was left unremarked. Never in her life had she felt so utterly inept or been so keenly aware of her inadequacies as a fighter. Getting angry and retaliating against them accomplished nothing except for ensuring that she found herself once again landing painfully on her backside with one or the other looming triumphantly over her. Still they pressed her, until every muscle in her body ached and she was practically weeping with frustration and exhaustion.

The frigid wind whipping off the bay from the Amaranthine Ocean ceased to matter, for she was panting and drenched in sweat by the time Isabela—with barely a sheen of dew on her upper lip and brow—called a halt and offered Zevran and Rìona an early supper. She promised she would be in port several more days at least, if Rìona found the time to return and continue her training, and led them below deck to her cabin.

Isabela's cabin boy had already left a tray of food and buckets of hot water, and stood by the door waiting as the captain stripped of her own leather armor and gave it to him to be wiped clean and oiled. She bade Rìona do likewise, and happy to turn the never-ending task of armor maintenance over to another for once, Rìona gladly obeyed. As they stripped, the pirate tutted at the condition of Rìona's stained and mended linen shirt and frayed breast bindings, which had been new just weeks ago in Redcliffe, but were already worn from incessant wear and the rigors of battle.

Isabela made a small hum of surprise and Rìona followed the path of her gaze down to notice, despite the constant travel and meager rations her company had subsisted upon, there was now the tiniest swell just above her pubis. How had she not noticed before? Rìona wondered. It was barely enough to be noticeable, certainly not enough to impede her, but the pirate's discerning eye had picked up on it. Isabela looked at Zevran questioningly and he shook his head quickly in firm denial.

"Blight's going to be hard on you, sweet thing," she said to Rìona, something not entirely kind in her voice, and Rìona nodded grimly. "You should take care of that."

"So I've been told," Rìona muttered, looking away.

Thankfully, Isabela let the subject drop. A staunch believer in creature comforts, was the pirate captain. She possessed a comfortable, though economically small, bed and her cabin was cozy, kept warm even on the windy seas by strategically placed braziers. In their heat, Rìona was not troubled by her nudity, and when Isabela took up a cloth and began bathing the sweat from her body with hot water from the buckets, she gratefully allowed herself to be pampered. Zevran stripped down to his linen shirt and leather breeches and made himself comfortable, draping his lithe form over a chair and watching as Rìona grew more relaxed under Isabela's ministrations.

The embers of the arousal Zevran had ignited that morning had been banked during the training, but they quickly flared to life despite her exhaustion when Isabela dropped the cloth and, pulling Rìona close, took Rìona's nipple into her mouth. Rìona's mouth dropped open in a gasp of pleasure, her body sagging, becoming more pliant. Her nipple, so exquisitely sensitive with her pregnancy, ached with each tug of the pirate captain's lips. Past Isabela, she saw Zevran's eyes grow darker and gleam with wicked interest.

She wanted him. Maker, how she wanted him! She almost resented Isabela's presence, for though she was lovely, the pirate was not what she needed. She needed what Zevran had promised her earlier: surrender. Surrender to his skillful hands and hypnotic voice and the fact that he, not Isabela, knew her burden and how to lighten it.

"Before you proceed further, Isabela, you should be aware that _la Guardiana_ is not allowed to have her release unless I say it shall be so."

The pirate released Rìona's nipple slowly, and turned to look at Zevran over her shoulder. "Zev, that's just cruel," she scolded. "If that's the game you were playing, you should not have brought her to me."

"Indeed, _Zev_," agreed Rìona, her voice flat with irritation.

Zevran shrugged. "But then I would deny myself the pleasure of watching _her_ service _you_, and that, I was not about to do."

"This 'game' of yours is quickly losing its fun," Rìona warned.

"Is it?" he challenged. "Except for the past few days, you've had your pleasure every morning and night, often several times. It's simple for you, finding someone to seduce, or inviting me into your tent, where I do so enjoy to be. Pleasure comes easily and readily to you. Obedience, however? No, that is not nearly so simple. You are too used to having your own way, having to command others, and that is not what you desire now. Can you honestly say you don't enjoy the challenge, the mystery, the constant state of yearning with no idea when it will be fulfilled? Tell me you do not anticipate finding out how much more powerful your release will be when it finally comes?"

She closed her eyes, swaying to the sound of his voice, her limbs weakening with desire. Maker help her, everything within her was a mass of need, but he was right. Even as her own body grew heavy and slick with arousal, the denial was delicious, taking her away from control and responsibility to a place where her only duty was to obey.

"If I can't give her pleasure, can I cause her pain?" Isabela asked him eagerly, and this time there was a pause as Zevran's eyes searched Rìona's. The words sparked another surge of arousal within her, but also... not fear, but... discontent. When he had promised her punishment, she had thought it would be at his own hands. If such a thing was going to happen, she didn't want it to be with Isabela, whom she didn't know, didn't...

...Trust.

She licked her lips, readying herself to protest, when Zevran narrowed his eyes thoughtfully and shook his head. "Er... no. I think not. Today it is for me alone to give the Warden both pleasure and pain. Perhaps another time. Warden, you will be certain to thank our fair Isabela _most graciously_ for her teachings, or I will be exceptionally displeased."

Relieved, Rìona smiled and leaned in to kiss the pirate captain, a delicate mingling of soft lips and deft tongues that soon had Rìona arching against Isabela, embracing her, sliding her body against the captain's. Suddenly a hard hand fisted in her hair, jerking her head back, and Zevran hissed in her ear, "Do you think I'm willing to wait all day while you dally, Warden?"

For a moment, Zevran pressed hard against her, hard enough to trap her between himself and Isabela. Hard enough for Rìona to feel the bulge in his breeches. His teeth closed upon her shoulder and began to clamp down, until her mouth opening in a wordless cry that Isabela swooped in to swallow. No tender love nibble, but a bite, deep and hard enough that a bloodless, throbbing ring of impressions remained when Zevran drew back.

"Pleasure her," he growled, and the hand in her hair dragged her downward, compelling her to her knees until her vision was full of generous hips and dark, glistening curls from which the heady musk of arousal wafted. Even more compelling than the hand that occasionally jerked her head sharply was the force of his will, demanding her capitulation, promising reward and recompense in equal measures.

It was for his sake, rather than the pirate's, that Rìona didn't stint to ply the skills she'd learned from her mother. Keenly aware of Zevran's attention, she took pride in Isabela's cries as her tongue parted the slick folds and found the pearl of her pleasure. Zevran's hand in her hair loosened and began to caress her scalp only to tighten again, reminding her of his presence, his compulsion. Isabela's cries grew louder, and her own hands came to rest on Rìona's head, lightly, for the sake of balance, as pleasure nearly made the pirate's legs buckle beneath her.

Even on her knees, perhaps especially on her knees, there was power, Rìona thought with a satisfied smile, humming to make her lips buzz until Isabela squeaked at an excess of sensation. Her parents had always told her it was so, of course; that had been the ultimate purpose of their tutelage, after all. But now she was beginning to understand. Power, and freedom. Freedom from care, from responsibility, from duty.

Suddenly there was a sharp crack and a flare of warmth on her backside, where Zevran's hard hand had reddened her skin. She yelped, startled, and pulled away from Isabela only to be drawn inexorably back.

"Lest you forget your purpose here," Zevran said smugly, spanking her again, harder this time, and again. "It will go all the worse for you if you falter in your labors. I do not recommend doing so again."

She brought Isabela to one climax there on her knees before the pirate, and another with Isabela spread upon the bed, Rìona's expert fingers thrusting and curling within her, driving her ever higher. And always, Zevran's voice, that beautiful rich accent beside or behind her, making sounds of enjoyment in her ear.

"It had been my intention to allow Isabela to pleasure you, until you were so very disobedient," he remarked almost conversationally, seated casually at the edge of the bed while Rìona worked, his cod-flap bulging. "That you do not spend your afternoon sampling such delights is entirely your own doing, _mi amada_. Either way, I get to enjoy the show, yes? Ah, how beautiful you are at your work! When we are done here, we must find someplace private to go. I intend to have you to myself tonight, yes, where your screams cannot disturb our comrades."

Evening was well underway by the time Isabela, replete, reclined upon her bed watching as Zevran and Rìona dressed. Despite the thrum of frustrated arousal, Rìona felt satisfied with the day's labors. Even—or perhaps especially—with the weapons training. It felt good to have learned something beyond the scope of her abilities. Isabela pushed herself up on her elbows and kissed Rìona, encouraging her to come back when she was not under such a cruel restriction. Rìona's armor, cleaned and polished, was delivered by the cabin boy, and Isabela gave her a clean linen shirt, breast-bindings and smallclothes from her own wardrobe. Zevran helped her dress, thanking Isabela for the lesson and the entertainment. His attitude could almost be described as eager as he ushered Rìona of the ship and away from the docks toward the market district.

There was only one place in Denerim Rìona knew of that would afford them privacy without costing them coin they did not have to spare. Though she was scrupulously unquestioning and obedient, her heart raced in anticipation of a night of pleasure as she led Zevran to the house Marjolaine had inhabited off the market square. He had clearly been paying attention to what Leliana did earlier in the week when they completed a series of break-ins on behalf of Slim Couldry, for Zevran deftly picked the lock and allowed them into the cold house.

Rìona had half-feared the landlord had reclaimed the property, but apparently Marjolaine's lease was paid up. Nothing had been disturbed; even the bloodstains were still upon the floor. Rìona ignored them as she and Zevran worked on building a fire on the hearth in the bedchamber, shivering within the tattered folds of her cloak until its glow began to warm the chilly room.

It was hard to say who attacked whom, once the room had been warmed, but suddenly they were upon one another, tearing at straps and buckles and ties, tumbling upon the bed. As he had against the wall of the Pearl earlier in the day, Zevran seized her wrists and pinned her hands above her head as he stretched out above her, drugging her with kisses, biting her neck, grinding his erection against her belly while she gasped and begged shamelessly for him to take her.

"Please, Zevran... oh, dear Andraste, please. I need you!"

"You want me, Warden?" he purred, sucking hard on her neck leaving bruises she knew others would see.

"Yes! Oh, Maker, please. I can't wait any longer. Now!"

"Ah, but you were most disobedient earlier, _mi ciela_," he said with a regretful noise, lifting his weight from her slightly. "I vowed you would be punished, and so you shall, unless you care to end our game now."

He hovered above her a moment, watching her eyes, and Rìona knew her own were wide with nervousness. This was where all her extensive knowledge became purely theoretical. Such games were known to her, of course, but beyond a bit of self-experimentation with soft floggers and tawses during her tutelage, she had no actual experience with them.

Zevran was staring at her, staring... staring... _waiting._ Waiting for her to refuse, or consent. For a moment, refusal lingered on her tongue, so very precariously close to being spoken. But if she refused, Rìona knew she would never have what he'd promised her, not truly. Surrender was simple when all one had to submit to was pleasure. In duress, that was where true surrender lay, and the freedom that came with it.

She bit her lip, closed her eyes, and nodded.

Zevran kissed her again, deeply, tenderly. He kissed her until her tension and fear had bled away, until she was pliant and trusting beneath him, until she would do anything, endure anything, just to win another intoxicating kiss.

It made the moment when he seized her hair and forcibly tore her away from his lips all the more shocking.

For a moment, she clung to him, mewling, her needy fingers scrabbling to draw herself back to him, but Zevran was implacable, the force on her hair inexorable. The expression on his face when she forced her eyes open was... stern. Cold. No hint of warmth or humor. For a moment she felt a frisson of fear, for it was not a face she had seen on him before, even in the heat of battle. Fighting, he wore a savage grin and made quips. This, she thought, was the face of a man who could spend the night in a woman's arms and murder her without remorse in the morning.

Every story he had shared with her about his life as an assassin for the Antivan Crows came rushing back to Rìona in that moment, replacing fear with terror. This was madness. Madness to trust him, madness to make herself even more vulnerable to him. It didn't seem to matter that he might have murdered her a hundred times since that day he had given her his oath of loyalty; in that moment she knew he was still capable of discarding the oath, if he found reason to do so. The assassin was still there, still a part of him.

But that hand in her hair, that painful pressure on her scalp, seemed to drive away all reason. Everything else paled in significance, all other considerations were diminished. All that mattered was surrendering to that pull.

She surrendered.

With efficient movements and a stranger's face, Zevran bound her arms behind her back with the belt of his baldric. It was no simple binding of her wrists, either. At his command she folded her arms behind her back, grasping each of her forearms close to the elbow. He wound the belt around both arms that way, and wrapped off the ends above her elbows so that each effort to win her freedom only made the bonds tighter. Rìona allowed it, gave herself over to it, fear and elation warring within her. Every pull, every jerk, every movement he made sent a tense pulse of desire through her. Any touch, an accidental brush, might have brought her tumbling over the edge of rapture, but that was not Zevran's purpose. Instead, he pushed her over until she was face-down amidst the pillows and moved away from her. She had to turn her head to the side to breathe, and her weight was unbalanced and awkward.

The first stroke of another belt was heralded—barely—by a faint whistle. Rìona cried out as a line of heat traced across her exposed buttocks. The pain was more intense than she had anticipated; she had expected something like the teasing spanking he had given her aboard Isabela's ship. This was different; pure pain, with no intent to arouse or titillate.

"Did you think this would be merely a game?" Zevran's voice, low and dangerous, queried next to her ear as Rìona whimpered at the lingering burn. His hand threaded once more through her hair, gripping, pulling, and again she felt that need to surrender settle upon her as it did so. "A few soft, almost pleasant taps, and you then call yourself punished? No, _querida_, that is not how it will be for you tonight. I will ask you once more if you wish to stop; I will not ask again and no amount of begging will compel me to do so."

She moaned as his hand stroked over the welt he had left upon her backside. "Please," she whispered, hardly knowing what she intended to ask.

"Please what, Warden? You must tell me. You must speak the words." The brush of his fingers on that hot line of skin was almost more than she could bear. She felt she could barely speak, struggling to force words past her lips.

"Please don't stop."

He didn't. Not for what seemed to be an eternity. Any attempt at stoicism she might have made was quickly broken, swept away by pain so intense it was impossible not to protest. Begging for cease availed her nothing, just as he had warned. And beg she did, pleading in agonized wails for him to stop. Again and again, the belt fell upon her skin, raising new welts, crossing existing ones, until it felt every inch of her backside and upper thighs was covered in liquid fire.

Begging gave way to shrieks and howls and then, at very long last, to sobs and tears that drenched the pillows beneath her and made her hair cling to her face in wet tendrils. Still he did not pause, not until she had stopped struggling and simply _surrendered_, sobbing so brokenly it ached and she thought she might be ill from it.

Once she started weeping, it felt she would never stop. It hardly seemed to matter that the strokes of the belt had quit falling or when Zevran unbound her numb and aching arms; still she wept. Grief and loss, fear and uncertainty, guilt and self-doubt and hopelessness, every unworthy emotion she concealed from them all as she struggled to lead her company, all of it poured out in those tears.

Rìona's head ached by the time she lifted it, too dazed and weary to wonder how she came to be held in Zevran's arms with her head against his bare chest, limp and pliant and trusting, while his voice murmured softly to her in Antivan. She thought she ought to say something, to thank him, or perhaps apologize. But once she looked up, he merely pulled her forward, toward his mouth. He dragged his tongue up the half-dried trail of her tears, tasting them, and then he kissed her. She tasted her own salt and sank into his kiss, surrendering to it as utterly as she had the belt.

Laying on her back was an agony, and yet it didn't seem to matter, as he rolled her over and rose above her, pressing her down onto the bed. Zevran swallowed her pained whimpers as her abraded backside brushed the bedclothes. Then he moved down her body, lavishing kisses and licks upon her breasts before proceeding further. He gripped Rìona's hips and brought her sex to his mouth. Within moments she was shrieking her pleasure to the rafters through a throat already raw with screaming, wave after wave of unbearable rapture crashing over her.

Barely had she caught her breath than he rolled her again and had her on her hands and knees. Deliberately he lightly scraped the tender skin of her buttocks with his fingernails, then he bent over and ran his tongue along her welts, tracing them, leaving cooling trails of moisture that at once soothed and renewed the pain. Parting the globes, he licked along the cleft between them, gently probing as Rìona moaned her pleasure. Even the pressure of his smooth, hairless face against her heated skin was its own delicious torment. The fingers of one hand gripped her hip while the fingers of the other slid carefully, gingerly into her other entrance, slick with oil, spreading and relaxing her.

_Dear Maker_, it was good. She could feel his hands shaking and knew his own capacity for self-denial was nearing its end as he pulled away and removed his breeches. When he returned, his fingers were replaced by something far more substantial. The was a hint of burning pain, and then such intense _fullness_...! When his pelvis pressed against her flaming backside, Rìona shuddered and moaned, burying her face in the bedclothes. But when he withdrew, she pushed back against him and followed, seeking more.

He gave it.

Screams that had nothing to do with pain were barely muffled by the bedclothes as she clawed and bit madly at them, lost in an excess of sensation. Each thrust brought fullness and sensation so intense she was certain she couldn't bear it. She moved away from it and ever, ever his hands were there to pull her back. Zevran's hand curled around her hip, his fingers seeking and then everything was lost in a mad vortex of pleasure. She screamed and clawed at the satin coverlet, sobbing with the force of her release.

Zevran tumbled over the edge behind her, spending himself deep within her rear passage. Rìona sank down weakly, her limbs refusing to support her any longer as Zevran carefully withdrew and pulled the coverlets up over her. A relaxed, sated silence settled between them as he sat propped against the headboard and Rìona lay with her head pillowed upon his tattooed thigh.

She felt wrung-out and exhausted, but there was a newfound lucidity as well, a clarity she had lacked when they had departed Genitivi's house that morning. Then, her mind had been churning with the impossibility of her duty. Now, having relinquished that burden for the day, she could come back to it clear-headed and refreshed.

There, in the aftermath of pleasure found on a dead woman's bed, in the middle of a city gone corrupt and mad, Rìona knew what she had to do.


	26. Chapter Twenty Six: The Whore

Years ago, the doña of an Antivan brothel found a way to earn ten times the amount she would have received for a whore of Eleanor Mac Dougal's standing. To do so, she had traded on the fact that the whore in question offered something the men who paid for her would have no hope of ever touching otherwise. The courtesans of Antiva reserved their favors solely for the most powerful and select of the nobility. By telling the well-to-do merchants who frequented her establishment that they could have an actual courtesan—though Rìona's mother had never been such—the doña increased Eleanor's value to something far beyond that of a common whore. It was still a pittance to what a courtesan would earn in gifts from her patrons, of course, but it was nonetheless significant.

Such was the basis of Rìona's scheme.

If it hadn't been for Sergeant Kylon, she might not have found the opportunity, but the sergeant had a problem he wanted Rìona's help with. A tavern called The Gnawed Noble, which prided itself on being an establishment frequented only by the nobility, had been overrun by a band of sea-faring mercenaries known as the Crimson Oars. Rìona surmised Loghain had hired them in an effort to secure the port against possible invasion by the Orlesians. For mercenaries, they actually seemed to be a decent bunch; they paid honestly and well for their spirits and made certain to obey the law. They weren't even harassing the other patrons. But apparently their presence made the tavern feel somewhat less than exclusive to its privileged clientele.

When Kylon informed Rìona that the barkeep wouldn't mind if her company killed the mercenaries—a little "sport," the woman called it—Rìona was furious. Here Ferelden was being torn apart by civil war and the Blight, and the proprietress wanted more lives wasted? She would risk her people's lives for much-needed coin, but not for the entertainment of bored noblemen and women with little else to do than hope for some diverting bloodshed. She resolved then that fighting the Crimson Oars would be the absolute last resort.

But how else could she convince them to leave the premises? She might ask politely, but if they were disinclined to heed her request, it would come down to bloodshed anyway. No. She needed to lure them out.

It was then that she hatched her plan.

Unsurprisingly, Zevran accepted it with his usual aplomb, despite the fact that it wasn't every day that a woman asked her lover to act as her pimp and sell her to other men. He merely gave her a long, searching look.

"You are sure about this?"

Rìona drew a deep, nervous breath and nodded. "I am. If we succeed, it will be something far more precious than coin we'll have earned when all is said and done."

They returned to Genitivi's house that night after they had visited Isabela, for she did not want her companions asking any questions, and on the way they discussed the matter. The following day, Rìona sent her companions out on various tasks and she and Zevran, with Conall in tow, once again went to Marjolaine's house; they spent the morning cleaning, rearranging the rugs and furniture to hide the bloodstains on the floor. As they worked, they rehearsed Zevran's sales pitch and what he would say once he had secured the mercenaries' interest. Then Zevran went shopping.

"You have everything?" she asked when he returned. Zevran nodded and unloaded his parcels.

Most of it had been amongst their own stores; lyrium dust and deep mushroom and reagents for potion-making. Indeed, the formula for the oil she had in mind was quite similar to the dwarven potion which heightened reflexes and agility. It called for slightly more refined lyrium dust, however, and less deep mushroom, and also the very slightest touch of madcap bulb. A concentrated tincture was made with the ingredients, which was then mixed into oil, preferably one scented and flavored to mask the bitterness of the ingredients.

_Las Lágrimas de la Cortesana._

The Courtesan's Tears.

It was a misnomer, of course, as the purpose of the oil was actually to intensify sensation. There was more than one reason, Teyrna Eleanor had explained, that the courtesans were a force to be reckoned with in Antiva. They offered not merely pleasure, but pleasure far beyond what a patron could experience with any other woman not trained in their arts. The oil could be used on the courtesan herself, to amplify her response to her patron, or on the patron, to heighten his pleasure.

Rìona proposed to use it to offer her intended clients an experience they would never have again.

As the slightly sweet smoke of incense of awareness began to permeate the rented townhouse, Rìona found the clothing and cosmetics she needed among Marjolaine's effects. At last she selected a gown in Orlesian style, dark crimson with a daring cut that left her shoulders scandalously bare. Her hair she left down in flowing waves, rather than binding it back in its usual queue at her nape. Fortunately, there was also a cloak—not sturdy or warm enough for actual winter travel, but in much better shape than her own tattered, fur-lined garment. She affected a short veil to mask part of her face, which she hoped—coupled with the cosmetics—would disguise her identity, for she would not want to be recognized by anyone afterward. Then she and Zevran made their way to the Gnawed Noble.

It was early afternoon by the time they arrived, late enough for the drunken mercenaries to be out of their bunks and once again gaming and carousing. Rìona followed behind Zevran, her head bowed demurely, as he purchased a bottle of Antivan brandy from the barkeep and then approached the leader of the mercenary crew, a tall, rough-spoken man with flaming red hair.

"My friend, might I beg a moment of your time?"

"What would an elf be wantin' with the Crimson Oars?" the man demanded.

"I thought you should be aware that the city guard will be here shortly, intent upon driving you from this tavern," Zevran said calmly. "You see, there have been complaints..."

"Complaints?" the sailor repeated, outraged. "We have good coin, and we're breakin' none of your laws. I spit on your complaints!"

"I agree, it is an injustice." Zevran's voice was heavy with sympathy. "But you may wish to reconsider annoying the nobility of the city, lest you find the source of your good coin dries up, yes? Instead, consider that your time and coin might be better spent in other pursuits."

"Eh?" the mercenary asked, and Zevran took Rìona's arm and pulled her closer. Positioning himself so that none but the leader and a few of the mercenaries closest to him could see, Zevran pulled open the front of her cloak, affording them a long look at her trim figure, made all the slimmer by their straitened circumstances and travels, displayed to full advantage by the narrow cut of the Orlesian gown. With his fingers beneath her chin, he lifted her head so that they could see her face beneath the deep hood of the cloak.

"A rare piece here, yes?" Zevran said softly. "No common whore, this, but a noblewoman fallen on hard times. Trained to please a man by the finest courtesan Antiva has ever known, but alas, ill luck intervened and now she is left to make her way as best she can. Her price is no small coin; she was intended to serve the highest of noblemen and she will cost you accordingly. But you will not likely ever see another so beautiful or so skilled, at least not one that a common mercenary such as yourself could buy for any amount of coin. All you need do is bring your men to a small house off the market square across from the chantry. Thus, the noble patrons of the tavern are kept content, and you and your men will experience a treat none of these fine nobles will ever touch. That way everyone is happy, yes?"

The leader of the mercenary crew looked at her for a long moment, and Rìona held his eyes, letting her own apprehension show, and a blush color her cheeks. He reached out, as though he would touch her, push her hood back, but Zevran's dagger blocked his way. "When your coin is in my hand, only then may you touch."

Casually, Zevran flipped Rìona's cloak back into place, covering her gown once more, and led her from the Gnawed Noble. Before the doors closed behind them, they heard the Crimson Oars' leader calling his men to gather around and get ready to leave.

When they returned to Marjolaine's house, Rìona was subdued. Though her heart hammered anxiously, she did not fidget or babble. A strange, contemplative silence had settled upon her. She was unwilling to speak, losing herself in her thoughts.

It wasn't difficult to work herself to arousal; nervousness had accomplished most of that deed already, requiring her to exercise little of the technique she had learned from her mother that enabled her to find desire even when desire was not wont to come.

This was going to happen, she thought, surprisingly unafraid. Within moments, those rough mercenaries would barge through the door. They would hand Zevran their money, and he would send her off to pleasure them. With the thought came another surge of tension, a coiling warmth knotting within her belly.

A whore. She was truly a whore. All that remained was the exchange of coin. Would it be enough for her needs?

Zevran, too, had fallen silent. He watched her cautiously, perhaps concerned that she was going to change her mind and he would be left to explain to a rowdy, half-drunken crew of mercenary sailors why the whore they were promised would not be servicing them after all. They both were wound tight, and they flinched when a loud rap practically splintered the door.

With his dagger drawn, Zevran opened the door and a full dozen men or more entered the house. Smoothing her hands down the velvet panels of her skirt, Rìona turned to face them, careful to keep the sheer black drape of her veil over her eyes. She drew a deep breath that lifted her breasts, pressing them against the tight bodice of the gown, and strove to appear both elegant and afraid.

The mercenary leader dropped a heavy purse in Zevran's hand. "Ye wanted our coin, and there it is; half the fee we were paid by the regent to bring our ship to this reeking city."

Rìona had to duck her head to keep from laughing at that. If only Loghain knew how his coin was being spent!

Zevran opened the purse and quickly counted the sovereigns within. "You may have her until sundown on this, no longer," he said firmly, drawing the string on the purse with an attitude of finality.

Nodding, the leader of the mercenaries strode purposefully toward Rìona, but Zevran blocked his way once more. "One last word of caution, my friends," he said. "You see the hound there? The mark of Fereldan nobility, as we all know. Should you seem to be in danger of harming his mistress, you will quickly find his teeth at your throat. You could sail every port in Thedas and never see the like of this one again. Such quality does not stand up well to ill use, and a broken or maimed whore is useless to me, yes? The hound and I will be keeping careful watch. If you or your men damage her, you will pay with your blood."

"'Ow do we know she's worth it?" one of the mercenaries demanded. "I want to see more'n a pretty face afore I give up my share o' the fee."

"You wish a demonstration?" Zevran asked. "Very well. Show them, my whore, just what their money has bought."

Nodding her assent, Rìona walked toward the sailor who had made the demand and sank to her knees in a single fluid movement. Slowly, she reached out, stroking her hand firmly over the bulge beneath his voluminous breeches, and licked her lips. The half-hard member beneath the rough fabric quickly grew firm. Her fingers quickly and delicately unlacing his breeches to release an erection which belied his skepticism. She gave a happy sigh, letting a smile curve her lips.

She would have this one chance to impress upon them that she possessed something they could not find anywhere else, for any amount of coin. And so she made a show of rapture at the mere sight of his shaft, promising a joyful service they would find in no common brothel. Pausing, she poured a small dollop of the Courtesan's Tears into her palm and used it to slick his cock. She stroked him with not just her fingers, but her face, nuzzling him, using her skin and eyelashes and even her hair to caress him as she held his hard, pulsing length in her hand.

In truth, it was not difficult to feign delight as she drew back the cowl to expose the flaring head, for she loved this act. She loved the slow reveal, the smooth glide of that amazingly soft skin. A cock was a sensory treat, full of soft textures and heady aroma and flavor, and this was amplified by the oil she had applied, affecting her own senses as well as his. A pump of her fist teased a droplet of fluid to the tip and Rìona's tongue darted out daintily to catch it, savoring it with a pleased hum.

By now, the Tears were beginning to have their intended effect; each stroke, each teasing swipe of her tongue, drew startled sounds of intense pleasure from him. It would have been easy for her to be perfunctory about the matter, bringing the mercenary to completion with little effort or artistry, but that was not in her interest. And so she took her time with it, inhaling slowly as she stroked him with firm pulls. She took a deep breath, calming herself, relaxing her muscles, releasing all her tension. Then she opened her lips and took him into her mouth, and in, and in, until the ridge around the head of his length passed into her throat and her nose was pressed firmly against the hair covering his groin.

After that, he was hers. They all were, watching avidly as she brought him slowly to release, not rushing through it but rather employing every bit of artistry she possessed. He was not a connoisseur of such pleasures, however, which made her job a bit more difficult when he seized her head and took control, thrusting deep into her mouth. It was then that she began to understand what her mother had meant when she said that a whore's clientele were not fit for the gifts of a courtesan. Still, his impassioned shouts spoke volumes to his comrades, telling them that this was no ordinary experience to be found on the docks. He found his release quickly after that, and she received it, licking her lips afterward, her eyes glistening with tears that had sprang reflexively up from behind her lids when he made her gag despite her training.

"Blessed Andraste's tits!" he panted when it was over, sagging and pulling away from her. "'And the elf 'is coin!"

As the mercenary tucked his softening member back into his breeches, she became aware of Zevran talking to the leader of the mercenaries.

"Ah, hers is a tragic story, yes?" he said theatrically. "Betrothed as a mere child to a great nobleman, she was. Only, her intended wanted a wife who was skilled and enthusiastic in the arts of the bedchamber so he need not pay to keep a mistress. Instead, he paid for one of the finest courtesans who ever lived to travel all the way from Antiva to teach his young bride about pleasure. I came as well, for it would be my job to protect the girl and preserve her chastity until she wed. No sooner was the wedding complete and the bride bedded, however, than civil war broke out when the regent claimed the throne. The lady's husband was killed, and his titles and lands forfeited. She was left with nothing but the skills he'd insisted she be taught."

On Zevran babbled, spinning a tale of half-truths about his whore's desire to see Loghain overthrown, and how she was hoping to raise enough money to support a growing resistance movement being marshaled by a number of noble houses, as well as the mysterious Grey Warden who had survived the slaughter at Ostagar.

When the leader of the Crimson Oars protested that their loyalty had been bought and paid for by Loghain's coin, she nearly forgot herself to render a scathing reply. But she caught herself in the last instant and bowed her head as she listened to Zevran's reply.

"Have a bit of brandy, my friend," Zevran said, pulling out the bottle he had purchased. The incense of awareness was doing its work; they were listening. "It is admirable that you stand by the bargain you made; Denerim overflows with mercenaries these days, but few can call themselves men of honor. But I would beg you consider also the number of nobles who oppose Loghain. Perhaps their chances of prevailing are not great with mighty warriors such as yourselves at Loghain's beck and call, but what if they should somehow prove victorious? It may be in your interest to have their gratitude. It is possible that you may not wish to serve Loghain as enthusiastically as you might otherwise have done, when he calls upon you to fight, yes? Or perhaps the coin he pays you may be diverted to some cause more worthy, with Loghain none the wiser..."

Whatever the mercenary may have replied with, Rìona missed it, for hands were upon her, pulling her up from her knees and into the crushing embrace of another mercenary, who plundered her mouth in a rough kiss. She allowed herself to smile and laugh, as though charmed by his good-natured enthusiasm, and took his hand, leading him back into the bedchamber.

The sailor began to strip, and as he did so, she noticed that behind him, Zevran had taken up position in the doorway, Conall seated beside him, where they could keep a protective eye upon her and make sure none of the mercenaries got too rough. Though he spoke to the mercenaries in the other room, he watched her closely, and she felt another tight pang of arousal, knowing his eyes would be upon her as they had her.

Rìona made a show of disrobing for the man, parting the laces down the front of her gown to let her breasts spring forth. She lifted them out of the constraints of her shift with her hands, gently pulling her own nipples and offering her patron a smile that was at once beckoning and demure. Scarcely had the gown slid down her body to pool at her feet than she found herself flung upon the bed with her shift bunched about her waist as the mercenary's eager fingers parted her folds and his lips laid claim to her breast.

She took them all, each in their turn. She applied the oil she had brewed sparingly, using just enough to heighten their experience without giving them any indication that they were being drugged. All the while, Zevran plied them with brandy as sweet incense wafted around them. He regaled them with tales of her hardship, with stories of the dangers of the oncoming Blight. He impressed upon them the lack of wisdom in dividing a land with civil war while a Blight spreads, and how whore and mercenary alike would be out of a job if the Blight continued unchecked. He spun wildly exaggerated anecdotes of the heroism of the Grey Warden, who was struggling against Loghain to save them all before it was too late.

She paused between each man to take a moment to wash herself with water from the ewer, cleaning away the seed they left behind. Some were easier to please than others and required little skill. Others were more discerning. Some even made an effort to pleasure her in return, and with the Tears upon her skin and in her blood, they succeeded easily. They were boisterously delighted when they drew cries of rapture from her lips, and few of those cries were feigned.

To her astonishment, the second mercenary to come to her left a gold sovereign upon the table beside the bed, and each man who followed him did likewise. The pile of coin grew when some came back for a second round. Though Rìona was growing sore and weary, she took them all so long as they had coin to offer. She silenced the voice in her mind that wanted to cringe in shame that she was selling herself like the lowliest strumpet. Her mother had done much the same once upon a time, after all. Though Rìona's straits were different than Eleanor's had been all those years ago, they were certainly no less desperate.

The leader of the mercenaries came to her last, Zevran's brandy heavy upon his breath. For him, Rìona exerted herself to ply every bit of her skill and let none of her weariness show. She pampered him with a long, sensual massage with the warmed, drugged oil, using more than her hands. She rubbed her breasts against his back until her skin was as slick as his. She tickled him with her hair, licked and kissed and nibbled her way down his spine. Her tongue slid between his twitching buttocks and caressed his knotted bud, drawing a shout from him.

When he tossed her onto her back and mounted her, she embraced his hips with her knees and met his thrusts enthusiastically, letting loose with all her energy and passion. She used every aching muscle to clench down on him, making her sheath so tight about his oiled shaft that it wrenched a groan from his lips. Her fingers found his hard nipples, pinching lightly as she nibbled at his chin and neck. His hand wedged between their bodies and she screamed in pleasure, quaking and shuddering around him with just a few caresses. He spent himself inside her, and when he did, Rìona kissed him as deeply and tenderly as a lover, and thanked him as though he had done her a great favor.

She lay there wearily as he dressed, but when he passed Zevran, she heard him say, "If you can get word to this Grey Warden, tell her the Crimson Oars will come to her call."

Soon the small house was quiet, and through the dirty window she could see the sky outside was full dark. Zevran came to her, then, with another ewer of water and her clothes and armor. Stretching her aching muscles, Rìona rose and counted the coins on the table. There were over twenty sovereigns there, and that didn't include what had been in the purse Zevran had been paid when the mercenary crew had arrived, nor the fee she would collect when she reported back to Sergeant Kylon that the mercenaries had been cleared out of the Gnawed Noble.

It was enough to buy all the supplies they could possibly need. Enough that they wouldn't need to seek employment again in their travels, if they were frugal. She looked at Zevran in amazement.

He was sober as he watched her, gauging her reaction. Rìona sat, staring at the coins, at the bulging purse, trying to decide how she felt about what she had done. A part of her wanted to be elated at her triumph, but it didn't seem fitting.

Once upon a time, she had aspirations of being queen. Now, she was a whore.

A whore, yes. But not merely a whore, she thought, pulling her shoulders back. Setting her jaw, she rose and began to wash and dress.

"Thank you, Zevran," she said solemnly as he continued to watch her, waiting.

"Are you well?" he asked finally.

"Sore, but nothing a bit of Wynne's magic won't heal easily. It's best I see her anyway," she added with a shudder of revulsion. "The last thing I need is a pox."

"And what will you tell our companions, when they ask how you came by this coin?"

For that, she had no answer, and the question plagued her as they once again tidied the rented house. Pragmatism won out over sparing Leliana's scruples and Rìona packed a sack with all the dead woman's smallclothes and the bed linens, which could be torn into strips for bandages and breast-bindings, or sewn into shirts. She brought the cloak she had worn to the tavern; it was not sturdy, but it could be lined with fur just as the other second-hand cloaks they had acquired, and would hopefully get them through until spring. It would do nicely for Leliana.

Astonished, Alistair demanded to know how she came to acquire the purse she laid in Morrigan's hand with instructions to finish making the necessary purchases. She also told them that on the morrow they would visit Wade's Emporium for some much-needed armor repairs.

Rìona drew a deep breath, lifted her chin, and raised her eyes to meet his, and told him the truth.

Leliana gasped in shock, and even Morrigan seemed taken aback. Only Sten seemed undaunted, but then, given his unique worldview, she supposed he merely thought it appropriate that she had used her skills as she was meant to do. But Alistair... Alistair grew pale, gaping at her, and then he fled to the outside, slamming the door behind him.

Rìona swallowed hard, struggling not to let her distress show, and turned a challenging glare upon the rest of her companions until it became apparent none of them intended to protest.

Wynne fussed over her, though it seemed her disapproval had more to do with Rìona risking her own well-being than with the means by which she had risked it. She used healing magic to soothe Rìona's aches and ensure that no unwanted infection took root. Then Rìona let herself be dragged into the bedchamber with its small wooden tub by Leliana, who prepared a more thorough bath for her than Rìona had accomplished washing up at Marjolaine's house.

She sat in the tub of tepid water hugging her knees to her chin while Leliana scrubbed her back. At length, the bard said, "You need to go speak with Alistair."

"No." Rìona shook her head in adamant denial. "I'm done chasing after him to explain myself."

"Then explain to me now," came his voice from the doorway, rough with an emotion Rìona refused to attempt to name. His eyes and nose were red, but she couldn't quite manage to convince herself it was entirely due to the frigid weather. That he had approached her while she was in the bath gave ample evidence of just how disturbed he was by what she had confessed.

Rìona stared at him warily for a long moment, until his tense posture drooped and he sought a chair. "Maker's breath, _why?_"

"We're desperate, Alistair," she said softly. "We can't purchase what we need on the scant coin we've been making doing odd jobs and selling what weapons and armor we can carry from our fallen foes. There are more jobs to be had, certainly, if we're willing to spend weeks or months crisscrossing half of Ferelden to see them done, but we don't have that sort of time. We need better equipment, and warmer clothing, or we're not going to survive a winter passage into the Frostback Mountains, especially as far south as this village, Haven. It's as simple as that."

"Is this my fault?" he asked raggedly. "Because of the coin I gave Goldanna?"

Sadly, Rìona shook her head. "No. There is no fault here. Did the loss of the coin you paid Goldanna hurt us? Yes, it did, but I take responsibility for that. You asked my permission to give it to her, and I granted it. This was _my_ choice. It was the most efficient way to get the supplies we need and get us out of Denerim before Loghain manages to catch up to us. More importantly, we managed to sway one of his mercenary companies away from his service. Loghain will be in for a rude surprise if he calls upon the Crimson Oars to take up arms against us."

"And to manage that, you decided to become a whore."

"To manage that, I decided to become a Grey Warden, and do what I must. I'll never be like Duncan, Alistair, capable of cold-bloodedly sacrificing anything and anyone on the altar of expediency. But this... this I could do."

She watched the struggle on his face as he tried to find a way to deny her words, but he couldn't. At length he rose from his chair and staggered out of the bedchamber, leaving her to finish her bath with Leliana's help.

After Rìona had finished in the bath, Wynne retired to the narrow cot in the bedchamber, which Rìona had insisted she take in deference to her age. In the outer room, she heard her companions settling down on their bedrolls and at length, left the bedchamber to join them.

Alistair was still awake, seated on his bedroll staring morosely at the hearth. Rìona did not acknowledge him as she spread out her bedroll on the floor beside Zevran and lay down, but sleep refused to come despite her weariness. She found her eyes drawn to Alistair, even when she attempted to turn her back to him and finally rolled to face him again, only to find his eyes, glowing in the firelight, staring at her.

"Did you enjoy it?" he asked miserably.

Rìona lay there silently for a long moment, unanswering. She could tell by the stillness that not all their companions were asleep. They, too, were wakeful, waiting for her answer. Zevran's hand crept discreetly beneath her blanket to rest reassuringly against her back.

Closing her eyes, she spoke the half-truth that she was certain would spell the end of whatever fledgling feelings Alistair had developed for her. It was for the best, she reminded herself. Now, after what she had done, more than ever.

"Yes."

Alistair did not speak again and when the breathing of the others had grown deep, and even Zevran's hand had fallen away, Rìona turned her head into her blankets and wept silently.


	27. Chapter Twenty Seven: Departures

Zevran would not be sorry to put Denerim behind them, even though it meant leaving the comfort of a warm, but humble, house and returning to sleeping upon the cold ground within tents. Being stationary unnerved him, especially once he'd realized Ignacio was in Denerim. Ignacio had waited three days before approaching the Warden with his offer; long enough to watch the Warden and get an idea of whether or not she would be of any benefit to him. But at some point in the three days prior to that contact, Zevran knew Ignacio had sent a message via the channels the Antivan Crows kept open for such matters. That message would find its way to Orlais, where Taliesen was carrying out a job of his own and awaiting Zevran, who was supposed to rendezvous there with Taliesen, after Zevran's business in Ferelden was completed.

That message would tell Taliesen, and every Antivan Crow who crossed its path on its way back to Antiva City, that Zevran had betrayed the Crows.

That message was a death sentence.

Zevran had known that, sooner or later, Taliesen and the Crows would learn that he had failed to kill his mark and had joined her instead. But he had hoped it would be months before anyone heard of it. Ignacio's presence in Denerim, and the message he had no doubt sent, had accelerated things. So long as he lingered in Denerim, Zevran and everyone with him was a sitting target. It was only good fortune that Ignacio had decided it was to his benefit to befriend the Warden, or else he might have decided to handle the matter of Zevran's demise himself.

Being back on the road, however, came with its own set of difficulties and intrigues, the foremost of which was the mage, Morrigan.

It would have been impossible to be unaware of the tension that existed between Morrigan and the Warden, even from the moment he joined their party. Zevran was not certain what the source of the strife was, but Morrigan had little patience for any of their company, and stopped barely short of actively antagonizing the Warden. Over the first few weeks as their companion, Zevran had watched as the witch rebuffed one overture of friendship after another. He had not understood why the Warden continued to bother, except perhaps that she was a born diplomat whose first inclination was to attempt to forge alliances with everyone she came into contact with. Perhaps it was a product of her courtesan's training, or merely the result of her keen awareness of politics. Whatever the reason, she was the honey to Morrigan's vinegar.

The only time he saw Morrigan unbend was when she wanted something. For the first couple of weeks after Zevran's failed attack upon them, the witch had isolated herself, studying a grimoire Zevran was given to understand they had found at the Circle of Magi tower. And then, suddenly, she began to join their company in the evening, and to not respond with acerbity whenever the Warden approached her. After several days of this, he overheard—well, perhaps _overheard_ was not the proper term, considering he had quite deliberately slipped into the shadows behind the Warden and was eavesdropping on her affairs—the witch make a request. Apparently, Morrigan was convinced her mother intended to take over her body in order to prolong her own life, and wanted the Warden to kill Flemeth to prevent it from happening.

Had it been Zevran, he would have refused out of hand. Even in Antiva there were legends of this Flemeth, the Witch of the Wilds. Tangling with an ages-old abomination seemed a risky proposition with little hope of reward, save in the questionable form of preserving Morrigan's life. But when it became apparent that Morrigan would leave their company and seek to find ways to defend herself if the Warden did not agree, the Warden had done so.

Zevran wondered if it was merely because she needed Morrigan's assistance in her efforts against the Blight, or if it was her own tendency toward acts of mercy which compelled her.

All of this had been a matter of mere curiosity, however. The witch had, after all, made no secret of the fact that she had no time nor patience for Zevran and wanted nothing to do with him. What agreements she and the Warden struck between themselves were none of his affair.

Until Denerim.

It was on their next-to-last day in the city, two days after the Warden had sold herself to outfit their company, that Zevran had been left behind with Morrigan to complete their acquisitions in preparation for departing Denerim. That morning in the back alleys of the city, the Warden had—quite literally—stumbled over the frozen and desiccated corpse of a templar, Ser Friden, whose journal described a nest of blood mages within Denerim, guarded by mercenaries.

To Zevran's mind, it was none of their concern. But the Warden had thought otherwise. Though their own templar, Alistair, had not spoken with her since the night she told her companions what she had done to earn them their coin, she had hurried back to the scholar's house with the journal to confer with him.

"_Why_ would a circle of blood mages be nestled in the heart of Denerim, where exists the largest templar presence in all of Ferelden?" the Warden demanded, pacing Brother Genitivi's living room with a scowl on her face. "It doesn't make sense. Such mages should be scattered and isolated, trying to remain undetected in far-flung corners of Ferelden, not practically thumbing their noses at the Grand Cleric in the very shadow of her own High Chantry! And with mercenaries for guards?"

"What would qun—_Tal'Vashoth_," Alistair quickly corrected himself at Sten's growl, "—mercenaries be doing guarding a nest of blood mages, anyway?"

The Warden looked ill. "Andraste's mercy," she whispered, her voice heavy with dread. "Are all these people in Loghain's employ?"

"What?" Alistair's voice was startled. "You think—but... when I brought the idea up at Soldier's Peak, you said even Loghain wasn't that mad!"

"I may have been mistaken," the Warden answered unhappily. "Marjolaine had some Tal'Vashoth working for her, after all. It could be these mercenaries simply went where the money is. But most of the mercenaries in Denerim right now are here because Loghain and Howe brought them in. And while the Tal'Vashoth have rejected the Qun, I can't believe—having originated in a place where mages have their tongues cut out and are kept in pens and on leashes—that they're so comfortable with mages that they'll protect them unless the pay is excellent. Where are the blood mages getting that sort of funding? And why are they here in Denerim, of all places, surrounded by a mass of templars, unless it's to be close to the seats of political power? 'A little nudge,' Avernus called it, when he and Sophia Dryden did it to get support against King Arland a hundred years ago. How many votes in the Landsmeet could such 'nudges' account for?"

"I don't understand it," the templar said with a shake of his head. "If you're right, how does he think he'll get away with it? Someone is bound to notice when the most adamantly opposed of the bannorn suddenly start singing Loghain's praises in the Landsmeet."

The Warden shook her head. "I don't know. As loathe as I am to view mages with suspicion just for virtue of the fact that they're mages, what I do know is my history. The last time the ruler of Ferelden employed a mage, the mage in question was responsible for countless deaths and nearly destroyed King Maric and the entire rebellion."

"Severan. Oh, Maker..." Alistair groaned.

Rìona grimaced. "Loghain should be the last person who would want to even appear to be going down such a road."

With that, they went to eradicate the blood mages and hopefully put a dent in Loghain's ability to resort to such methods. And Zevran was left alone with Morrigan.

For someone who had been quite outspoken on the fact that she wanted nothing to do with him, once they were alone together, the witch seemed to be of an entirely different mind. She didn't—quite—offer to have sex with him, but suddenly she was all inviting glances and sultry eyes. No doubt she meant it to be flattering, but it put Zevran immediately on alert, for Morrigan did not trouble herself to be charming unless she wanted something.

Had she done so just a few days previously, he might have taken her up on her implicit offer anyway. The witch was quite beautiful, after all, and delightfully wicked. But something had changed, the night after he and the Warden went to see Isabela.

That night he discovered that somehow, without his realizing it, everything had been turned upside down and nothing was the way it was supposed to be. In truth, things had started going wrong long before that. It had just taken him a while to catch on.

He was not supposed to have survived his attempt to kill the Warden. He'd planned his death perfectly. He'd hired helpers who were just incompetent enough to fail, without making it seem deliberate. He'd planned a trap so clumsy a child could detect and spring it.

It was not guilt which had driven him to seek his own death; he was not that dramatic, though certainly he felt remorse for what he had allowed to happen. No, what fueled his desire to die was the fact that death would be preferable to a lifetime of servitude to the Crows, to knowing his own life was worthless, subject to being discarded at a whim. A lifetime of endless killing, punctuated by hollow pleasures and wrapped in a shallow façade of arrogance masquerading as pride. He'd had little enough ability to choose his own fate, since the doña of the brothel in which he'd been born had sold him to the Crows. But his death, that he could choose.

When he had learned the Warden's name, it had settled the matter. Rìona. Rinna. He could not entirely convince himself it was an accident that there should be such similarity between the woman whose life he had carelessly discarded, and the woman whose hand he had chosen to deliver his own death.

Or so he thought. But in the course of the Warden questioning him, another opportunity to choose his fate had presented itself, and he had seized it blindly. Not the opportunity for death—though that was still a strong possibility—but the opportunity for freedom.

It would never have happened, if things had gone as he planned. The mighty Grey Warden was not supposed to have allowed him to live. It was a foolish risk, one Zevran himself would never have taken, had their positions been reversed. But the mighty Grey Warden was not what she was supposed to be. She was supposed to be the hand of judgment, dealing swift and merciless retribution. That was what he had signed on for. She was not supposed to be barely more than a girl, one with child no less! She wasn't supposed to be a mediocre fighter, overwhelmed and uncertain, and trying to save a land that apparently didn't want to be saved.

She wasn't supposed to treat him with dignity, as though he mattered, as though his life had value and meaning. She wasn't supposed to regard him as anything more than a disposable asset, and certainly not as someone with a history in which she seemed genuinely interested. She wasn't supposed to behave as though the fact that he'd been born in a brothel, sold as a slave and made his living killing people didn't matter. And she absolutely wasn't supposed to have anything in common with him, such as secrets and regrets, or a mother who had been a whore in a brothel only a few streets away from the one in which he himself had been born, or knowledge of his homeland and language and a philosophy on sex and pleasure that so closely paralleled his own.

She wasn't supposed to care about what he wanted, offering not to hold him to his oath, asking him about his wishes for the future.

She wasn't supposed to _need_ him. Not merely as a fighter, or a warm body in her bed, easily exchanged with another, but for something he alone of all her companions seemed capable of giving to her.

He hadn't realized that was what was happening at first. When she had first taken him to her bed, it had seemed simple enough. She wanted pleasure, and why not accommodate her? She was young and lovely and very talented. It certainly cost him nothing to indulge her. Joining her in her tent by no means precluded the possibility that, if a better opportunity came along, he might change his mind, slit her throat, and go back to the Crows bragging about how his initial "failure" had actually been a ruse to get inside the Warden's guard to be sure that the job was done properly. The worst that could happen would be that the Crows would kill him anyway, in which case he was no worse off than he had been when he took the job on the Warden in the first place.

But then came that night in the dead bard's house.

He hadn't known, when he proposed a naughty game to distract her from her concerns, what would come of it. Not until they were aboard the ship and he saw in her eyes her reluctance to give herself over to Isabela, and realized it was he alone that she wanted in that moment. Anyone could give her pleasure and distraction, but still she wanted him. And then, when he got her alone... That was when he saw the fear and doubt she still held. She knew he could yet betray her. He had thought she was being foolish and blindly trusting, to take him to her bed. He thought she had taken him for granted, thinking him no more threat than a lapdog, believing his oath of loyalty to actually be more than an easily-discarded convenience.

He had been wrong. She knew what she did when she put herself in his hands. She knew the risk she took, knew he could kill her. But she did it anyway.

Why?

He didn't think she wanted death; she had too many things she cared about to be suicidal. No. She did it because he had something she needed, he and he alone. He had the ability to take her away from the crushing burden of her obligations, those obligations to which she felt so unequal. None of the others could do it; not the bard, scarred and skittish, and certainly not the virginal templar who knew nothing about such things. Perhaps the witch might have done so, had she been inclined, but that was not to be.

Only once before had he known such a thing. Only once before had he been something more to someone than a replaceable commodity.

He wasn't supposed to wind up holding her as she wept over things which had nothing to do with pain and pleasure.

Zevran did not believe in redemption. He did not believe in the idea of a benevolent fate offering him a second chance. Such insipid romanticism was not for him.

But the Warden offered him all the things he'd felt he was lacking when he sought his own death. Freedom, dignity and pride, perhaps even purpose. And all he needed to do, in order to have it, was manage not to betray her.

Thus he found himself faced with a choice, as he pretended to be interested in Morrigan's advances, without actually accepting them, while he tried to puzzle out her angle. The witch wanted to distract him, or lure him away from the Warden, or even just make the Warden think he was being lured away. Perhaps she wanted to drive the Warden away from their company and get rid of her.

It shouldn't have been any concern of Zevran's what games the witch played, unless they affected him. Zevran could easily let himself be distracted, or lured away, if that was her aim. But he didn't know why Morrigan wanted that, or why he should allow it.

It might be better, after all, for the Warden not to need him, better to let her think him interested in the witch. The Warden did not seem the jealous type, likely to drive him out for dallying—or supposedly dallying—elsewhere. He would still have her protection against the Crows if he let Morrigan seduce him.

Unless, of course, the witch intended the Warden harm. In that case, he might find himself in a very difficult position indeed. If something happened to Rìona, would the templar be inclined to extend him the same mercy? Or would Zevran be driven out, or slain?

And why, when he thought of these considerations, did they all seem less important than the need he'd seen on the Warden's face that night he had whipped her?

The puzzle got more complex when the Warden returned from the blood mages' hideout, setting her bow beside the door. If she was less splattered by blood than the rest of her companions, it was only by a very little. They all looked exhausted, as though all the many hours they had been gone had been filled with fighting.

Without a word, Morrigan—still giving Zevran alluring looks and displaying none of her customary venom—set about making tea for the weary company. She filled clay cups one after the other with hot water and fragrant leaves, but before filling the final one, she noticed the stew she was preparing seemed in danger of burning. She turned to stir it and move it away from the fire, then resumed making the tea, filling the final cup.

Which she then placed by the Warden's elbow.

Every instinct within Zevran began screaming in alarm, even as Morrigan continued to attempt to distract him with inviting smiles. The Warden, whom he had noticed in the past was wisely cautious about accepting food and drink from others, took the cup in her hands unthinkingly and wrapped her chilled fingers around its warmth. Her attention was not on the tea at all, but rather upon the templar, whom she watched with a bemused and somewhat sad expression.

Zevran was in motion before he knew what he intended to do.

"What are our plans for the evening, Warden?" he asked smoothly, drawing her eyes from the templar. Once he had her regard, he seized her gaze and held it, moving toward her slowly, deliberately. It was a look and a walk meant to seduce without words, and he'd used it to good effect many times before. The Warden, who was so knowledgeable about pleasure—if somewhat foolish with her emotions—could not fail to recognize the intent.

When he reached her, he took the warm cup from her hands and placed it back on the table. He then hopped lightly up to sit on the table before her, swinging a leg so that his thighs bracketed her torso, blocking her in.

The Warden blinked in surprise, and Zevran knew why. They had made no secret of the fact that he shared her tent, but he wasn't usually so blatant in the way he approached her outside its privacy. Still, there was no help for it, even though it was an unambiguous declaration of refusal to Morrigan's unspoken offer.

"I'm... really not certain," the Warden answered after a long moment, giving him a perplexed frown. The hair on his neck stood up as he felt the witch's eyes upon his back, but he did not turn to look at her. "I intend for us to depart Denerim at first light. I suppose most of the evening will be spent dividing our supplies, so that no one carries more of a burden than they can bear. It will be a long walk to the Frostback Mountains, after all.

"Can I convince you to delay the task a while? It is our last evening in Denerim. It ought not to be wasted, I think." He leaned closer, until he was a breath above her, poised as though he might lean down or draw her up for a kiss. The Warden gave him a quelling look, but he refused to be daunted, even though she seemed embarrassed by the attention. They had attracted the notice of all their companions, now. Except the templar, who would not look at them. That was a fact for which Zevran felt some regret, for he had no wish to cause Alistair grief.

Whatever reply the Warden had been ready to render was suddenly swept aside when he shifted his pose and—_almost_ accidentally—overturned the cup of tea he'd taken from her hands.

"_¡Mierda!_" Zevran hissed as the hot liquid spread across the table, scalding the back of his thigh before he jumped down. He quickly shoved papers away from the creeping pool and swept the tea to the floor with his hand. "Forgive me, Warden. Your beauty has distracted me and made me clumsy."

He dared a glance over his shoulder. Morrigan was giving him a look of utter loathing. Zevran doubted she would be attempting to lure him away again.

"Is... everything all right?" The Warden asked carefully, glancing back and forth between them. All traces of the witch's earlier good humor were now gone. Zevran dropped down from the edge of the table to bear the clay cup away and fetch a cloth to dry the mess he had made.

"Quite all right," he assured her, tossing the cloth aside. "Come, Warden. It is our final night in the city, yes? Let us go and make the most of it!"

Between Morrigan's glare and Alistair's refusal to so much as glance in their direction, the Warden could find no adequate reason to remain in the house with its stiflingly tense atmosphere. They left.

There was nowhere else that afforded them both privacy and comfort, and so they returned to the house that had been rented by Leliana's one-time lover and bard-master. There, on the bed where she had serviced the mercenaries, while he played the pimp for her, she let Zevran distract her from all her questions about what had passed in the blood mages' hideout and then back at Genitivi's house. And, in return, Zevran let himself be distracted from concerns about Morrigan's schemes. Only when he tensed and shuddered between her thighs as she rode him—glorious in her abandon—and then sank back down onto the bed beside him did questions start to plague him again.

"Tell me," Zevran asked, his voice carefully neutral as he lightly stroked his fingers along her spine. "The witch, Morrigan. Does she have reason to wish you ill?"

"None that I'm aware of," she answered with a shake of her head. "Though, she has not agreed with my decision not to rid myself of my babe. She..." The Warden's voice trailed off, her body going tense against his as she swallowed hard and blinked rapidly, her eyelashes fluttering against his shoulder. "She has... advised me that there is no telling what effect the Joining may have had upon the child. It could be... deformed. Monstrous."

Zevran made a soft, hissing sound and shifted upon the bed. The Warden shook her head brusquely.

"But no, to answer your question. In fact, she has great reason to wish me well, for I've agreed to help her with a difficult situation she faces with her mother, if we should happen to pass south close to the Korcari Wilds again."

"Ah, good. I am glad to hear it."

"Did... something happen today?"

"Er... no," he answered, hesitating only slightly. In truth, he could not accuse the witch of any wrongdoing. He never saw her add anything to the Warden's cup that she had not put in any of the others. But Zevran had spent too many years mastering the use of poison to be easy with what he had seen.

He rolled up onto his side, propping himself up on an elbow and leaning over her. After a moment, she pushed herself up on her elbow to mirror his pose.

"You don't need my permission, you know," she said. "I have no claim upon you." He almost believed her, until her eyes dropped. Whatever was happening with Morrigan, she was not ignorant of it. Like him, she did not know the scope of it, but it was clear that the thought of him with Morrigan troubled her, and not due to jealousy. It made her uneasy, perhaps especially because she had allowed herself to be vulnerable with him.

Why had she done that? he wondered again. She wasn't supposed to trust him. And she certainly wasn't supposed to do so as an act of conscious will.

Zevran laughed, though he had to force it a bit. "While I appreciate the thought, and the freedom to choose, _dulcita_, I think it would be safer to take a viper to my bed than our Morrigan. This interest of hers is too sudden. I do not trust it." He shook his head and repeated the conclusion he'd arrived at earlier in the day. "She seems the sort of woman who does not exert herself unless she wishes something in return."

The Warden peered at him with a puzzled frown. "How is that unusual? You'd be the first to tell me we all want something in return."

"I think the witch's price would be far too steep," he replied, lying back again. "No, if I am to be anyone's plaything, better it be yours."

"Plaything? I'd hardly call it that."

Her rapid denial surprised him. "No? I would have to be deaf and blind not to notice the tension between you and our templar. I have no objections, of course," he said quickly. "This is all very pleasant and we have agreed to make no demands upon one another. But are you sure you're not merely biding your time?"

"Biding my time for what?" asked the Warden, her voice bitter. "For Alistair to suddenly and miraculously accept me? To overcome his qualms about the fact that I am perfectly willing to play the harlot, whether for a purpose or merely pleasure? To not hate me when he learns I seduced his brother and fully intended to become queen, or suspect I am attempting to do the same with him?"

"Yes. That. Precisely."

"It's not going to happen. I'd be a fool to expect it. No. I confess to caring for Alistair far more than I wish I did, but it can never be more than that. I'm not simply filling a temporary vacancy with you, Zevran."

"I see." Somehow, he doubted it was as simple as she made it sound, but he didn't press any further, and she didn't volunteer any more. Still, he felt obligated to make a final point. "It is good to know where we stand, then. You should be aware, however, that though I am many things, I am no cheat. Should the situation change between you and Alistair, you will do me the courtesy of letting me know, yes?"

"Of course," she agreed, as though surprised he felt the need to ask. Zevran felt out of his depth. How did something which was supposed to be uncomplicated wind up with this many complications?

They fell silent, lying there together, and it was not a casual, relaxed silence. It was tense and waiting, until she finally broke it.

"Will you tell me who Taliesen is?"

The question, so apropos of nothing that had passed before, startled him. Zevran flinched as though stung before he could check the reaction.

He wanted to demand where she had learned that name, but then he remembered. Ignacio had mentioned him.

"You know the Crows will come after me, sooner or later," he answered carefully. "Taliesen is but the nearest of them and will be the first to respond when it becomes known what I have done."

"But he's more than that," the Warden said observantly. "You... react to the mention of his name."

"Yes."

He could feel her eyes upon him, but he could not make himself meet them. "If he's going to make difficulty for me or threaten one of my people, I need to know. How much trouble can we expect from him?"

"He's an excellent assassin. As good, if not better, than myself. And we belong to the same cell, under the master who took the contract on you. Now that I have failed, the job will fall to Taliesen. Killing me will be an added bonus. He will not stop until he is dead, or you and I are."

He felt, rather than saw, her nod. She fell silent again, and when he finally dared glance at her, she had pulled her lower lip between her teeth and seemed to be fretting over a point of indecision. Finally, she drew a deep breath and asked, "And will you tell me about your history with him?"

He should. He knew he should. After the trust she had placed in him, it was only right. But he could not. The shame was too deep.

"I... Forgive me, but I would rather not. Not at this time."

"I see. Very well, then."

And as easily as that, she let it drop. He said he didn't wish to discuss it, and so they didn't.

That wasn't supposed to happen. She wasn't supposed to respect his wishes.

She wasn't supposed to respect him.

With no intention of doing so, he found himself pulling her to him and she came willingly, openly, unreservedly. Even after his refusal to speak, she held nothing back.

It wasn't supposed to be like this at all.

As they left Denerim, Zevran knew that the oath he had given was now more than just an empty and convenient promise. He would keep an eye on Morrigan, and do what he could to lighten the Warden's burden along the way.

It was not how it was supposed to be. But, he thought, pressing closer to her warmth on their bedrolls that first night after they left the city, it might be better.


	28. Chapter Twenty Eight: Burdens

Rìona jerked awake in the silence of the night and took a moment to orient herself. Behind her, Zevran's voice—with a lucidity she envied, considered he'd been as sound asleep as she—asked, "Are you well, _dulcita_?"

"Yes," she murmured. "I'm fine. Just... a dream. Go back to sleep."

Her envy was not alleviated by the fact that he actually obeyed. She coveted his ability to move smoothly and easily in and out of sleep, relaxed in repose one instant and suddenly alert the next. Though she'd gotten better at it since becoming a Grey Warden, waking in the night always left her feeling muzzy and disoriented, and going back to sleep was usually a labor of some diligence.

Unable to see the sky, she could not ascertain how late—or early—it was. It had to be at least midway through second watch. Zevran had sat first watch and she had fallen asleep alone in her tent, but now he was asleep and had been long enough for his bare skin to be warm beneath their blankets.

She lay there, blinking at the faint flickers of firelight and shadow across the heavy waxed canvas of her tent, and felt an urge she knew would not allow sleep to return until it had been alleviated. Sighing and thinking wistfully about proper bedchambers with chamberpots and servants to empty them, she slid out from under the arm Zevran had tossed carelessly across her. She pulled on two pairs of woolen stockings and her boots, wrapped her ragged, fur-lined cloak about her shoulders and ducked out of the tent. Zevran did not comment on her leaving, though she knew he was aware of it. By now he was used to her increasingly frequent nighttime trips to the latrine.

Conall lifted his head when she emerged from her tent and went with her into the trees, her faithful guardian. The night was freezing, and she shivered beneath her cloak as she returned from the trees. Beside the dim fire, Wynne sat on a stump with a wisp of light glowing over her head, mending what appeared to be Alistair's padded arming doublet. Rìona shook her head and smiled. Alistair was inept with a needle, and the maintenance of the clothing they wore beneath their armor was crucial, for they would not be a very effective fighting force if their armor began to chafe their bodies raw. Rìona, at least, had spent enough time in her life embroidering tapestries that she could manage to mend her own clothing, but Alistair invariably had to go begging.

If Wynne was on, it was third watch. The mage preferred the early-morning shift. Age, she claimed, compelled her to wake earlier with each passing year, and so she might as well put that time to good use. Unlike Rìona, she was not wrapped in a cloak or shivering. Though not as skilled with manipulating fire as Morrigan, Wynne knew enough to be able to surround herself in a sphere of warmth. When she glanced up and saw Rìona approach, she expanded it so that Rìona could sit beside her in comfort. There was not room on the stump upon which Wynne sat, and so Rìona sat on the ground near the mage's feet, gathering the tail of her cloak beneath her.

How far she had come, Rìona thought with a wry smile. Lady Cousland of Highever, seated on the dirty ground wrapped in a tattered cloak scavenged from some rag-picker's wares, wearing patched, mended and stained linen breeches.

"Trouble sleeping, Warden?" Wynne asked placidly, turning her eyes back to her mending.

"Mm. Bad dreams," Rìona murmured. Wynne cast a glance at Alistair's tent, and Rìona shook her head. "No. Not of the archdemon, for a change. I dreamt of my child. I dreamt he was born a monster. He, um... he looked like a darkspawn."

"Oh, child..." the mage said softly and fell silent.

Rìona sat there a long moment, the camp silent but for the occasional snore from various tents—including, most hilariously, a strange whistling sound from Leliana's—and small crackles and pops amongst the embers of the fire. Wynne did not bother to feed it any more than necessary to maintain a bed of coals that could be stoked in the morning, since she had her own means of keeping warm.

"Is there any way to tell if there will be... problems... with my babe?" she asked at length. "Some magical means?"

"No," Wynne said kindly. "I'm afraid that is the province of the Maker alone, and since He has left us, we have no way of knowing. Any babe may be born deformed, at any time and for any reason. It is the chance every woman takes, when she chooses to carry her babe or cast it out."

"But not every woman has the darkspawn taint in her veins," Rìona said, her voice tight as she blinked rapidly. "Am I being a fool, to carry this babe?"

Wynne sighed. "Perhaps. But no more so, I think, than any other woman who decides to have her child in difficult times. It's obvious the babe means a great deal to you, and that you have not made your decision lightly, or without understanding the consequences. Wars, droughts, famines... even Blights pass, but our hope for the future endures."

A single tear escaped her eye and made its way down her face and, sniffling, Rìona wiped at it and leaned her head upon Wynne's knee. After a moment, Wynne set aside her mending and her hand gently stroked Rìona's hair. It was strange, perhaps, that she should feel such affection for Wynne, considering how maddeningly intrusive her advice could be at times. But together, they were a young woman who had lost her mother, and an older woman used to being a guide and mentor. They filled a need for one another; for, more than anything, when Rìona thought of the pregnancy and birth and burden of motherhood that lay before her, she longed for her own mother's love and guidance.

"Have you considered who you will foster your babe with, if the Blight is not ended by the time he comes?" Wynne asked, still stroking Rìona's hair.

She shook her head, sniffling again. "No. So long as Loghain and Howe accuse my family of treason, I'm cut off from all the allies I once might have looked to. I don't dare leave the babe in Redcliffe. Arlessa Isolde is... unstable. She's certainly no one I want fostering my child. I've thought about trying to contact the Arl of South Reach, Leonas Bryland. He was a close friend of my father's, and of all the Fereldan nobility, I know him best. But as far south as his arling is, he's directly in the path of the Blight. I also suspect he's in a precarious position politically as a known adherent of my father's, and if the resistance to Loghain's regency spills out of the Bannorn and onto his arling, things may get difficult for him. I'll have time enough to decide, I imagine. The babe will be born in the height of summer during a Blight, which means wet-nurses are certain to be scarce as food supplies dwindle. No doubt I'll have to keep him with me until he's weaned, even if it means staying in one place for a time and turning leadership over to Alistair to continue the struggle against the Blight."

Wynne hummed in what sounded like agreement. "I think the idea that such a thing might be necessary is beginning to occur to Alistair as well. He's... changing, you know."

"Yes. I know," Rìona whispered.

That change had become apparent soon after they had left Denerim, and Rìona feared at first it was driven by anger. Anger at Zevran's continued presence in her tent. Anger at her for what she had done. Since Denerim, he'd been grimmer and more withdrawn. Thankfully, he didn't attempt to ignore or avoid Rìona, but he wasn't as open as he had once been. Rìona regretted that loss, and missed his light and easy humor. She wondered, again and again, if she had done the right thing, selling herself to earn the coin with which they had provisioned their company.

But there were advantages to this new face of Alistair's, as well. If he was reticent in some regards, he was more assertive in others, particularly in battle. Often these days, once enemies were sighted, Alistair subtly and silently took the lead. It wasn't announced as such, or even all that overt, but it was there, in his alert attitude, in the way he positioned himself at the front of the party and authoritatively gestured them to stillness, while he attempted to discern which of the currents and eddies of power within the place came from Wynne and Morrigan, and which were from their foes. Sometimes in the heat of battle he would even begin to direct their small force, calling out instructions, for Rìona and Leliana to aim their arrows at this foe or that, or for Zevran or Sten to engage another.

Rìona wondered if he even realized he was doing it. She said nothing when it happened, but merely watched as all the anxiety and uncertainty that had been on his face since the day she had played the whore for the Crimson Oars melted away. This was the man she'd gotten a glimpse of at Ostagar, and outside Castle Redcliffe when they had fought the revenant. Ever so often, he peeked through, a man who was confident and knew his own abilities and standing. It was breathtaking to behold. He was so afraid to lead, and yet he did it so naturally when he wasn't thinking about it, when he knew what had to be done and that he was the best person to do it.

Watching him, Rìona understood at last why she loved him, despite the circumstances and fundamental differences that made that love impossible. She loved his gentleness and goodness and purity. But equal to that, she loved the bottomless well of untapped potential within him, striving to flow freely. Potential for strength, for confidence, for aggression and goodness and even passion.

She cursed the Chantry and Arl Eamon and even King Maric for nearly driving that out of him.

She cursed herself for longing to be the one to help him unleash it all and watch him soar.

"I can't tell you the number of young men I've seen go through such a transformation," Wynne mused, combing her fingers through the tail of Rìona's tangled queue. "Even though babes born to mages in the tower are taken away to be raised by the Chantry after they're weaned, it still has an impact. A man—a worthy one, at least—seems to blossom in his own way just as the woman who carries his child blossoms with her pregnancy. He's never quite the same."

A lump formed in her throat, and Rìona had to close her eyes against the notion of Alistair as an expectant father. "That's hardly an apt comparison, Wynne."

"Isn't it? It may not be Alistair's babe you're carrying, child, but he's no fool. He knows you're not going to be able to continue to lead us past a certain point and that it will fall to him. Fatherhood may not be the burden he's preparing himself to bear, but he's preparing himself nonetheless."

Rìona chuckled softly, for no other reason than it was better to laugh than allow herself to pursue that line of thought too completely. "What brought these observations on, anyway? If you hadn't already spent a considerable amount of time extolling for me the inherent selfishness of love, Wynne, I'd accuse you of attempting to be a matchmaker."

The mage's knees shook with her own laughter. "My old memory could be failing, but I believe I recall you telling me in no uncertain terms what I could do with that particular bit of sagacity."

"That's because I disagree. Oh, I've seen the petty romantic possessiveness that sometimes masquerades as love. But I've also seen the lengths people will go to and the sacrifices they will make for the sake of real love. Not merely for a lover. I'm speaking of love of family. Of duty. Of honor. Of home and country. If not for love, in one form or another, what else do we have that's worth sacrificing ourselves?"

"If that's the case," Wynne said slowly, "then what does it tell you that Alistair is maturing to help you bear your burden, and Zevran is not?"

Rìona stiffened, lifting her head from Wynne's knee and moving away from the mage. "Don't, Wynne. I know you disapprove of Zevran, and I don't expect you to understand why I need him right now, but..."

"I have disapproved of Zevran," Wynne acknowledged quickly, holding out her hand in a conciliatory, warding gesture. "Especially after what he helped you do in Denerim. I couldn't fathom what sort of man would _aid_ in such a thing. But I see how having him near you helps you, when you're feeling overwhelmed. I wasn't criticizing, child."

"Then what are you trying to do?" Rìona asked rigidly.

"I worry what's going to happen when the sort of help he offers now is no longer the sort of help you need," the Circle mage answered. "When what you need is actual assistance meeting your obligations, rather than a temporary shelter in which you can forget about them for a while. When... distraction... is not the balm it is for you now."

Those were fair enough questions, Rìona thought, some of her tension subsiding. She sighed, shaking her head. "We'll adapt," she said simply. "Or we'll end things. Neither of us has any delusions that such a thing is not a very real possibility. But you're wrong, you know, in thinking that Zevran isn't changing. Perhaps it's not in ways _you_ can see, and perhaps it's not in ways that will necessarily be useful when I'm confined to my child-bed, but it's there. And I'm content with that. I'm not auditioning fathers for my babe, Wynne, and I have no intention of doing so. Queen Moira managed to raise Prince Maric alone while leading a war; I shall do the same. I can't think too far ahead or I'll simply be crippled; I have to be able to endure the present moment. What Zevran offers is what I need _now_, and that's what's important. Far more important than love, or a future I may never live to see." She scoffed. "Honestly, can you see Alistair giving me the latitude to do what I must, as I did in Denerim?"

"The boy I met when you saved the Circle Tower? No," Wynne replied honestly. "But the man he's becoming? Perhaps he may turn out to surprise us. Or perhaps you might someday find value in having someone reel you back when it turns out _latitude_ isn't actually what you need, but rather a more conventional way of looking at matters."

For that, Rìona had no reply, and Wynne let the subject drop. After a moment, she rested her head on Wynne's knee again, and Wynne resumed stroking her hair. At length she dozed, and did not awaken until their companions began to rouse for the day.


	29. Chapter Twenty Nine: Snares

Rìona grew fretful as they crossed the Bannorn by the North Road, for doing so offered her little insight into how far the Blight had spread in the south. There were tales of the horrors of the Blight, but little concrete information about which arlings and bannorn had fallen, and whether Loghain was putting up any sort of resistance to the spread of the darkspawn horde.

But it was necessary, for they had needed to return to Soldier's Peak and collect the armor Mikhail Dryden had adjusted for Alistair. Despite the inconvenience, she had to admit the result was worth it. Levi Dryden's brother did excellent work, reforging the silverite plate with the Warden-Commander's crest upon it to fit Alistair. He looked resplendent in it, somehow taller, straighter, prouder. He loved being a Grey Warden, loved wearing that crest. And Rìona loved seeing him looking so pleased.

It seemed to be the only thing that really made him smile these days. It wasn't that he was angry, or sulking; often he merely seemed lost in thought. But he had lost some of his customary good cheer and it made Rìona's heart ache to see it, for she felt very much to blame. Her actions in Denerim, prostituting herself, her continued reliance upon Zevran, even what she had said to him after he'd visited Goldanna... How many wounds could she deal him, before his innocence was extinguished forever?

Tired of her mind traveling such fruitless and dispiriting paths, Rìona carried her empty rough-hewn wooden bowl to the kettle of melted snow they had set beside the fire to clean it, casting a scowl at the darkening sky as she did so. Between the snow and the short winter days, their progress was far slower than she would prefer. Twice since Denerim, they had been unable to break camp at all, for the snow had been so fierce that traveling would have been deadly. The endless days of walking seemed to blend into one another, but it had been late Wintermarch when they had departed Denerim. Unless she had completely lost track, Wintersend would be upon them in a few days, bringing in the warming days of the month of Guardian. Typically this would signify the advent of the vernal season, though the melts wouldn't really begin until mid-Drakonis. But this particular winter looked to be long and brutal, and unless the trend changed, Rìona wouldn't place money on the possibility of seeing any significant warming until late-Drakonis or even Cloudreach. The spring planting would be late this year.

Perhaps it was a mercy. If the darkspawn were slowed by the snows and ice, they could not invade Ferelden as quickly, spreading the corruption of the Blight. But a long winter meant a depletion of food-stores, and that could be problematic on another level, resulting in an earlier famine as granaries ran empty, than if Ferelden only had to contend with the failure of crops due to the Blight.

"_Guardiana_." She turned and rose, setting her cleaned bowl aside, as Zevran approached, Leliana a step behind him. "Come, let us train. Our fair bard here has a skill you might wish to learn."

"Oh?" Rìona looked over at Leliana, who was grinning at the prospect, eager to have some knowledge she could pass along. She had attempted to teach Rìona to sing, but though Rìona's voice was pleasant enough, she had no aptitude for music.

"You've been concerned over the impact your babe is going to have upon your ability to fight, have you not?" she asked, and Rìona nodded slowly. "Of course. You cannot simply ask the Blight to stop while you go into confinement. We must work with what we have. If you are going to continue to carry your babe, we must find ways around this."

"All right. I'm listening."

"Zevran has made a good start with you," Leliana said, and something about her demeanor was different. She was normally so gentle and unassuming, but now there was an indefinable air of... authority, perhaps? She'd been much the same when she'd attempted to teach Rìona to sing, only now it was more pronounced. "Teaching you to attack from concealment and a fighting style that focuses on wit and evasion are both excellent ideas. I think we should continue along that path, emphasizing skills which allow you to attack from a distance, draw little attention to yourself, and... escape aggressors when they turn their attention to you."

Zevran took over the explanation. "The bard and I both have some skill with poisons, this you know. Leliana does not think it a good idea for you to be handling such substances yourself, and under the circumstances—" He nodded at her middle; he didn't often address the fact that she was pregnant. Rìona imagined he did not like to think about it. They both knew their affair would end when she had a child to consider, after all, and Zevran was not likely to welcome the kind of commitment being involved with a woman who had a child entailed. "—I think perhaps she is right. But we can make for you flasks, and teach you to throw them amongst your enemies. When they break—and sometimes explode depending on their contents—they can deal considerable damage. You must learn to be precise, however; it would not do to hit your allies, after all. This will take some skill in knowing how to handle such things, even if you do not mix them yourself, especially since you will also need to carry the vials on your person and must be sure not to damage them."

"I can also teach you to play dead," Leliana said with a giggle. "It's a simple trick; I don't know why it never occurred to me before to teach you. If you find yourself under attack, you can sink to the ground and lay so still, your foe will assume you're dead and move on to the next target, at which time you can slip back into the shadows and attack again."

"And finally," Zevran added, "we can teach you to use a well-placed blow to stun your enemy long enough to gain some distance and hopefully find concealment again. Hopefully with these skills in place, your vulnerability will not create as much of a liability for the rest of us, _sí_?"

It stung to hear it put so bluntly, and yet they were absolutely correct. Choosing to carry her babe had been a selfish decision on any number of levels; she would not have her people put at risk because of it, not if she could help it.

Thus, as darkness fell, she found herself practicing switching from her bow to her daggers quickly, specifically for the purpose of using the pommel of the dagger to deal a stunning blow to an attacker so that she could slip away. They drew an audience, particularly from Sten and Alistair. Zevran and Leliana traded off, taking turns attacking her with different kinds of strikes that she first needed to parry before she could deal the blow.

Leliana came at her, daggers drawn for the attack, when Rìona suddenly found herself feeling disoriented and dizzy. Her attempts to parry the attack were clumsy and without warning she fell off-balance and stumbled, accidentally tripping the bard so that Leliana fell atop her. A sizzling pain shot across her ribs and Leliana quickly pushed herself off Rìona, looking down in horror.

"_Sacré_ Andraste, no! Sten, get Wynne!"

"It's all right!" Rìona gasped as Sten, grumbling, walked off toward Wynne's tent, to which he was closest. She brought her hand away from the wound to see her fingers and palm covered in blood. "It's just a scratch."

"What happened?" Alistair demanded, rushing to kneel by her side. "Suddenly you just keeled over!"

"I... don't know," Rìona said, shaking her head. The pain and shock of the wound seemed to have erased the wave of disorientation. "I'm terribly sorry."

Leliana and Zevran's nimble hands pulled at the buckles of her cuirass. Annoyed, Rìona saw the leather was cut and would need to be mended.

"Is everything well?" Morrigan asked calmly, approaching them where they huddled around Rìona.

"Nothing," Leliana said, waving the witch off. The two didn't care for one another. "The Warden and I were sparring and I accidentally wounded her."

"It's just a scratch!" Rìona hissed in irritation, though each breath hurt. Pulling the linen of her shirt, wet and sticky with chilling blood, away from the wound was painful. A deep scratch, then. Any lower and it might have missed glancing off her ribs and pierced something vital, or perhaps even her babe. "It's my own bloody fault for being so clumsy. I can dance with a skill fit for the royal court of any nation in Thedas, but with a dagger in my hand, I stumble like an ill-tutored lout. My poor arms master at Highever despaired of me years ago."

"There, there," Wynne said soothingly, rushing to kneel by her side. A glow lit the mage's hand as she placed it over the wound and she shook her head, echoing Rìona's earlier surmise about the fortunate placement of the wound. "It's clean and will heal nicely, though you're very lucky it was no lower."

"Were you casting a spell?" Alistair asked Morrigan suddenly, frowning at her. From the corner of her eye, Rìona saw Zevran's head come up as he, too, turned his attention to the witch, staring intently. "Right before she stumbled? I sensed magic."

"'Twould be surprising, indeed, seeing how little _sense_ you actually possess. If you must know, I did but renew my fire," Morrigan shrugged, gesturing to the blaze before the lean-to shelter she had constructed for herself from wood they had gathered. "'Tis likely all you felt. Since you seem to be in capable hands and in no immediate danger of dying, I shall bid you good eve."

A moment of silence fell after she departed, and finally Leliana shook her head as Alistair asked of no one in particular, "Is it just me, or was she trying too hard with that one?"

Rìona almost laughed, though pain quickly negated that option. Zevran's eyes followed Morrigan as she walked away, but Rìona's attention was quickly diverted by the strange, aching itch of healing magic. Beside her, she could see Alistair shiver lightly, as though a cold breeze had crept down his neck, and wondering if all magic affected him that way. For that matter, perhaps a cold breeze _had_ made its way down his neck. Sitting on the ground, she was starting to lose feeling in her extremities.

"There, that should do it," Wynne said briskly, rising. She addressed Zevran as Leliana located Rìona's cloak and draped it over her shoulders. "Get her into her tent and keep her warm. We can rearrange the watch schedule to take her shift tonight. No arguments!" The mage gave Rìona a stern look. "Bad enough you insist on taking a watch shift at night when you're practically asleep on your feet during the day. Growing a babe is a wearying task. There are seven of us now, not including Conall, which means you could forgo sitting watch altogether and we'd still have enough to keep watch in pairs, if we wished to. If you disobey tonight, I'll stage a coup and arrange it. See if I don't!"

Thus was Rìona bundled into her tent, under the watchful and concerned eyes of many. For once, there was no evidence of disapproval in Wynne's mien as the flap closed behind Zevran. Once inside, she heard Alistair shout to Morrigan that she was sitting first watch—they didn't actually keep watch in pairs, although they could, because Rìona had decreed everyone should get a solid night's sleep at least every other night. With Conall and the magic wards Morrigan and Wynne placed, it seemed to be enough.

The camp slowly settled into stillness as each person sought his or her tent. Though weary, Rìona's nerves refused to settle. Perhaps it was the close call, the thrill of a narrow escape, but her hands sought Zevran eagerly.

"You will have to be quiet," he warned with a eager chuckle, nipping her neck just above the point where the pulse throbbed. His fingertips pulled at her nipples as she writhed against him. "You are not the one who will incur Wynne's wrath in the morning."

She shut him up with a kiss, thrusting her tongue into his mouth as she rolled him onto his back and straddled him. He pulled away from her mouth long enough to chide her for her impatience, and then speech became much more difficult. Words gave way to eager gasps and moans. She rode Zevran hard, moving faster, more urgently, driven onward by a need she could not name despite her exhaustion.

Finally it was Zevran, spent and weary himself, who gripped her shoulders and pushed her away as she continued to nuzzle him insistently, trying to rouse him once more. His voice sounded almost annoyed in the darkness of the tent. "Come, Warden. Rest, now."

It was like an itch deep beneath her skin, the desire to continue. It wasn't lack of fulfillment, for Zevran knew her responses well by now and plied them ruthlessly. And yet that strange, plaguing restlessness, urging her onward...!

When she would not be still, Zevran rolled so that his back was to her, and Rìona had to cross her arms over her breasts and tuck her hands tightly into her armpits to keep them from wandering her body. Finally, at last, the urgency subsided and she fell into a depleted slumber.

The next day, her weariness was so complete, she ached with the need for sleep. Wynne began fussing when they stopped for the midday meal, concerned that she was coming down ill, and did not stint to scold Zevran for not ensuring Rìona got enough sleep.

"I am not a nursemaid," Zevran said with cold arrogance as Rìona slumped against a tree, too exhausted even to eat.

"Stop, Wynne," she muttered tiredly, her eyes trying to close despite. She yawned widely, trying to push herself to her feet. "You sound like a... mother hen."

It took a rejuvenation spell to enable Rìona to continue with the day's travel. Late that afternoon they encountered a minor skirmish between Loghain's men, and soldiers of the Bannorn. Though the men of the Bannorn were outnumbered, her company turned the battle decisively in their favor. Rìona, however, could not claim any credit for aiding in the victory. Her exhaustion was so complete that it affected her aim with her bow. Nor was she as able to attempt to slip into shadows as Zevran had been teaching her to do and thus prevent attracting attention from the enemy. Conall intercepted a soldier she hadn't even seen charging her, dragging him down and tearing his throat out only yards from her position.

At last, Loghain's patrol was defeated and the Bannorn troops—Bann Grainne's men, she learned, belatedly noting the heraldry on their shields, were grateful and shared their rations with Rìona's company. They were headed to Winter's Breath, they explained, where Bann Grainne's husband—acting in her stead, as the bann was heavy with child—and a number of other bannorn were gathering to stop any incursions of Loghain's forces into the Bannorn. Not only did Loghain have press gangs roaming the countryside, conscripting able-bodied men to join his army against their will, he was also starting to lay claim to food stores of the Bannorn, in order to feed the army he was attempting to assemble. Denerim's own food stores were being heavily depleted by the influx of refugees from the south.

"Regent or no, he has no legal right!" Rìona protested, roused from her weariness by her amazement when the commander of the troops told her that. "If the bannorn have paid their annual taxes and harvest-time levies to the crown, they owe no further duty unless the Landsmeet ratifies a declaration of war!"

"That's what Bann Grainne says, my lady," the commander said with a nod. "If the regent would just commit to using the levies of troops and food stores to fight the Blight, the Landsmeet would give him everything he needs and then some; tales coming out of the south have them scared half out of their wits. But all they see is the regent sending his troops to reinforce the ports and mountain passes in the north while the Blight continues to spread in the south."

Rìona sighed. "Loghain, you blind fool!" she muttered to no one in particular. "You can't deny the possibility of a Blight with one breath, and use it as an excuse to claim wartime powers for the crown with the next."

They made camp with Bann Grainne's troops that night, as it was too late to proceed once the dead had been collected and a pyre ignited. Though she spoke late into the night with the commander, trying to get an idea of Loghain's activities, Rìona felt better in the morning than she had the previous day. The aching sense of weariness was gone and they broke camp at daybreak to continue their journey west.

Her heart was heavier with news of the political situation, however, and with the confirmation that the Blight was spreading unchecked, while Loghain was still trying to wrest control from the bannorn.

She awoke in the middle of the night from a powerfully erotic dream, her body flushed and pulsing with need. With her pregnancy, dreams of an erotic nature were much more common, but this one was particularly vivid. She reached for Zevran and he awoke with a wicked smile, happy to accommodate her. But even after a series of climaxes so intense they were nearly painful, after Zevran was spent and ready to sleep again, she found herself unable to rest, anxious and fidgeting, craving more.

"What is it, Warden?" Zevran muttered groggily.

"I don't know," she whispered, struggling to remain still and find sleep. Suddenly Zevran tensed and flung back the blankets, grabbing a dagger and dashing nude into the freezing night outside the tent.

There was a moment of silence, and then Morrigan's voice, heavy with disdain, called from close by the tent, "Is there something you need?"

"Have you been out here all along?" demanded Zevran impatiently. "I heard someone outside the tent."

"I've been going around checking the wards Wynne and I set when we made camp," she answered, sounding bored with the query. "One is near the Warden's tent. That may be what you heard."

Zevran made an irritated sound and came back inside the tent. His skin was ice-cold and it was some time until he warmed enough to sleep. By then, Rìona was finally drowsy, drifting off to sleep while Zevran continued to stare at the canvas over their heads, the fingers of one hand tapping lightly upon his chest while the other continued to clutch his dagger. 

* * *

"Alistair, my friend, may I have a moment?" she heard Zevran ask as he jogged forward to catch up with Alistair and Sten.

"Yes?" Alistair sounded annoyed, as he often did when Zevran approached him.

"I am wondering about these templar abilities of yours," Zevran said lightly, pretending not to notice his irritation. "You can sense magic, it is true? Is this an ability others can acquire?"

"Anyone trained in the right disciplines," Alistair replied slowly. "Why do you ask?"

"It sounds as though it would be a most useful skill, if one wished to protect oneself against attempts at sabotage or assassination."

"I'm not certain you could learn it, even if I was willing to teach you," Alistair said, thinking for a moment. "The templar training focuses on a defensive style, it requires being able to stand still and concentrate while simultaneously fending off attacks. Your style is different, more agile, more focused on inflicting injury rather than warding off attack."

"Ah." Zevran sounded unhappy with that answer. After a moment, he asked, "Can you sense magic at all times, or does it require an effort?"

"Well, if you do it long enough, it becomes second nature," Alistair shrugged. "I don't really even think about it, anymore. It's just always there, this... awareness."

"And can you sense all kinds of magic? Are they each different?"

"What do you mean?"

"Does a fire spell feel different from an ice spell or a healing spell?"

"No, it's not that specific," answered Alistair with a shake of his head. "I feel the energy being channeled, but not the sort of spell it's being channeled into."

"Can you still sense it when you are asleep? Say, in camp at night?"

"There's always magic in camp at night, due to the wards Morrigan and Wynne place. But it's more passive. I imagine if someone were to actually cast a spell, I'd sense it. Whether I'd do so strongly enough to wake up... I'm not certain. You have to understand, I was never _really_ a templar. I just received the training. A lot of this is still theoretical knowledge."

"And what about energy from other sources?" Zevran asked. "There's magic that uses mana, yes, and then blood magic also?"

"Hmm. I hadn't considered that," Alistair said thoughtfully. "I've only been exposed to blood magic a couple of times, not really enough to determine if it feels different."

"What about this magic of Morrigan's? Sex magic. I heard what happened at Redcliffe, and the Circle Tower. Did that feel different?"

"I... don't know. Both places, the Veil had been damaged pretty extensively. There was so much power flowing around there, I don't know if I really could have picked out those particular spells, even though they were happening right in front of me."

Zevran made another disgruntled sound. "Ah. Well, thank you for answering my questions."

"What's all this about, anyway?" asked Alistair.

Zevran raised his hands in an innocent shrug. "As I said, it simply sounds like a useful skill to have."

As they stopped for the midday meal, Leliana joined Rìona and Zevran, eating her rations of dried fruit and strips of salted meat with a moue of distaste.

"Entertain us with a tale, dear bard," Zevran cajoled charmingly. "Tell us again about Morrigan's mother, Flemeth."

Leliana gave a delicate shudder. "No, thank you," she declined. "I haven't been able to think about the legends of Flemeth without nightmares since Morrigan told me what she did to her lovers."

"Oh?" Zevran's voice dropped to its naughtiest timbre, an eager gleam lighting his eyes. "What is that?"

Leliana ducked her head and spoke in a soft, confidential murmur. "Apparently, she takes Chasind men to her bed and makes love to them until they are _drained._ Not simply metaphorically, you understand. She actually kills them with pleasure."

"But surely this is simply a tale," Zevran scoffed.

"It could be, I suppose," Leliana replied. "But frankly, after seeing how exhausted our Warden here was, when she participated in Morrigan's magic at the Circle Tower, I can easily imagine it."

The assassin went still for a moment, and then relaxed with a laugh that sounded forced. "Well, there are worse ways to go, yes?"

When Leliana had gone, Rìona gave Zevran a searching look. "Are you going to tell me what this is about? All these questions about magic in general, and Morrigan in particular?"

He shrugged, much as he had earlier with Alistair, deceiving no-one with his casual demeanor. "I merely wish to know about the company I keep."

Displeased with his answer, she stared at his back as he walked away. Since Rìona had agreed to help Morrigan deal with Flemeth, the witch had made more of an effort to be pleasant company than had previously been her wont. She was not fool enough to miss the undercurrent of tension between Zevran and Morrigan, though. She just didn't know what it meant, and half the time she felt too weary to try to make any sense of it.

That night Zevran kept watch first shift, and Sten second. Rìona stirred and grumbled when he lifted the blankets to slide his cold body beneath them, but couldn't be bothered to rouse and greet him properly. Then, hours later, they both woke with a start when a loud snap and an angry cry sounded outside the tent. Grabbing his daggers, Zevran once again ran outside.

"What is this, you fool elf?" Morrigan demanded querulously. "Are you attempting to sever my foot?"

"Ah, forgive me!" he answered. "I shall have the trap off in a moment. There! Ah, but those are some deep wounds. You may wish to have Wynne look at them in the morning."

"I can care for my own wounds, thank you!" she snapped. "What do you think you are doing, laying traps around the camp?"

"I am simply exercising the same caution you and our Wynne demonstrate with your magical wards, yes?" he answered simply. "We cannot be too careful with the Warden's safety, I think. I would imagine you, especially, would be concerned, seeing how she has agreed to help you with this pesky problem with your mother."

"I... er, yes, I suppose that is true," Morrigan muttered ungraciously. "You might exercise more care where you lay your traps in the future."

"Oh, I don't know. I think this test worked remarkably well... though not from your perspective, I suppose. Perhaps it might be best if you place your wards farther from the Warden's tent, from now on," Zevran suggested. "I think I may make a habit of laying such traps. Who knows? I may even poison them in the future. It would be a shame to get caught in one of those, yes?"

Morrigan did not answer, and a moment later, Zevran returned. Despite the cold, she wrapped herself around him and shared her heat. "Is Morrigan attempting to harm me?" she asked softly.

"I... cannot say," he said uncomfortably. "It may very well all be coincidence and professional paranoia on my part. I have not _seen_ her take any action toward you that I could say is harmful, no."

"But you suspect her."

He shrugged. "I suspect everyone. But she is powerful, our Morrigan, yes? A valuable ally to have at one's side. I would not wish to deprive you of her services unnecessarily."

"I see. You will keep me apprised, if you notice anything else in the future?"

"_Sí_," he answered confidently. "Sleep now. I do not think we will be bothered again tonight."


	30. Chapter Thirty: Truths

Though it would actually be a shorter journey to pass Lake Calenhad to the north and then travel south to Haven along the lake's western shore, such a route would have them in the foothills of the Frostback Mountains for days, with deeper snows and more severe cold and more treacherous footing. Moreover, Rìona wished to stop by Redcliffe and check on Arl Eamon's condition before continuing their journey to Haven. So they angled south across Bann Loren's lands to intersect the road south along Lake Calenhad's eastern shore that would take them to Redcliffe.

She was not familiar with Bann Loren, save by reputation. He was not a well-liked man, for he tended to change his allegiance easily whenever it was advantageous to do so. This meant very few of his neighbors in the Bannorn had not known the sting of his betrayal, as he sided with them in the Landsmeet one season then against them the next. He actually possessed very little land and his coffers were impoverished these days, as his freeholders abandoned him for a more steadfast bann. Fereldan folk valued the virtue of loyalty, and Bann Loren had none save to himself.

Rìona did not think her company would find welcome on his lands, particularly since his wife and son, Lady Landra and Dairren, had been killed at Highever the night Howe's forces attacked, and she suspected he would blame that loss upon the Couslands. If the balance of power rested with Loghain and Howe, Loren was likely to lean in their direction anyway; the fact that they were putting word about that the Couslands were traitors meant he'd be absolutely disinclined to aid her.

And so, leaving the highway where Loren's guard was likely to patrol, Rìona's company cut south and east along faint cart and hunting trails through the forest, traveling quietly and hoping to avoid notice. When shouts and the clanking of armor rang through the woods from directly ahead of them, they quickly left the narrow trail for the shelter of the trees. Rìona made a gesture to Zevran and he faded into the shadows between trees and slipped silently in the direction of the commotion. She was tempted to try to follow him, but did not trust her skill at stealth enough to risk it.

There was a shout, and then the noises diminished, as though the armored men had left, moving on in the opposite direction from her company. Almost immediately, Zevran came slipping back through the trees.

"Come. Hurry," he said to Rìona, gesturing for her to proceed. He led her ahead, with the rest of their company following slowly and carefully, to the writhing form of a man bleeding upon the trail. Only when his convulsions of agony made him roll toward Rìona did she realize she recognized him.

"Elric! Elric Maraigne!" Rìona gasped, rushing to kneel beside him. Cailan's man, part of his elite guard. He'd been outside Cailan's tent when she had bedded the king. He knew what had happened.

"My Lady... Cousland..." Maraigne gasped, his eyes widening. "I thought you were dead. I thought all the Grey Wardens... were dead."

Frantically, Rìona looked about for her companions, but they had not yet caught up. She didn't dare shout, and instead tried to staunch the bleeding from his wound with her hands. Directly through the gut, he was pierced. Someone had tried to skewer the man.

"Hurry, Wynne!" she muttered urgently, and then to Maraigne, "I assumed all of Cailan's guard fell on the field at Ostagar with him. How came you to be here?"

Maraigne coughed and a disturbing fleck of blood appeared on his lips. It was far too reminiscent of her father's final, desperate moments of life, and Rìona snapped at Zevran, "Get Wynne, now!"

"I've been... in the bann's dungeons for some weeks now. I didn't think his men... would notice my escape so quickly. And now... I'm a dead man."

"No, Elric. No. I have a mage with me, a healer. She was at Ostagar also."

He shook his head. "It's all right, my lady. I should have died that night. I should have died with my king. But when I saw Loghain's troops withdraw, I... I was a coward. I deserted. I left my king to die. I told myself someone needed to carry the tale of what the teyrn had done. But the truth was, I just didn't want to die."

There was a loud rustle and then Zevran emerged from the underbrush with Wynne and Alistair immediately behind him. Alistair murmured in surprise as he, too, recognized Cailan's guard.

"Wynne, can you heal him?"

The mage's hands glowed as she set them upon Maraigne, and the blood flowing from his wound slowed to a sluggish trickle, but after a moment, she withdrew her hands with a frown.

"He's dehydrated and half-starved and half-frozen. He's lost more blood than he can replace in such a state. I'm sorry."

"Get him some broth, some water, build a fire...!" Rìona demanded urgently, but Zevran shook his head.

"Unwise, Warden. The bann's men have not gone far enough yet. If we wish our passage to go unnoticed, we'd best not."

"When I lost blood at Redcliffe, there was a potion Jowan used—"

Wynne gave her an apologetic look. "Even if I had the proper herbs, by the time I prepared it, he would be dead."

She opened her mouth to argue, but Maraigne's hands, covered in his own tacky blood, closed over hers. "Please, my lady... before I die, I must tell you. Before the battle, the king called me into his tent. He gave me the key... to the royal arms chest, and asked me to keep it safe. He told me if anything... happened to him, I was to give it to _you_ if I could, or at least another Grey Warden... who could deliver it to you."

"Why would Cailan—?" Alistair began, but Rìona cut him off.

"Where is this key, Elric? Do you have it still?"

Maraigne shook his head. "I hid it, at Ostagar, for safekeeping. Good thing, too. If I hadn't, it would be in Bann Loren's hands now."

With his dying breaths, Elric Maraigne described the statue beneath which he had buried the key, and begged her to return to Ostagar and claim it and lay Cailan's body to rest if she could. Rìona nodded, promising she would do so as soon as they were able. Then he died. Rìona wanted to carry his body into the woods and find a clearing in which they could build a pyre, but she knew they could not linger or risk drawing that sort of attention. And so they left him there for the wolves and continued on their way. 

* * *

She spent the afternoon lost in her own thoughts, planning the logistics of a diversion to Ostagar. It would have to wait until after they went to Haven; it wasn't worth risking Arl Eamon's life to claim whatever Cailan had wanted her to have, but they must go. Despite her preoccupation, Rìona couldn't fail to notice Alistair's annoyance, which mounted as the day moved into night. Finally in the gloaming, far from the place where they had left Maraigne's body, they made their camp. After supper, one by one their companions retreated to their tents, but still Alistair paced on the outskirts of the clearing, as though waging a battle within himself.

Her heart heavy with dread, Rìona offered to take Leliana's watch shift for her, and waited by the fire wrapped in her cloak, watching Alistair pace. Finally he came striding toward her with his jaw set and tense with determination.

"Why would Cailan want you, of all Grey Wardens, to have his key?" he demanded. "I can see him asking to pass it on to me, but what was his connection to you?"

With a tranquility she didn't actually feel, Rìona looked up where he loomed over her and returned his scowl with a level gaze. "You're an intelligent man, Alistair, however much you doubt yourself. Don't dance around the point while you pretend to fit together the pieces that have already fallen into place. Ask me what you really want to ask."

His shook his head, scowling. His voice was heavy with self-deprecation. "If I were all that intelligent, I would have put it all together back then. All those conferences and summons from Cailan those days before the battle. I can't believe I didn't realize it before. I don't even know how to ask, without being crude." He drew a deep breath, hesitating a moment. "Are you carrying my brother's child?"

"Yes."

"_He_ was the one you intended to marry."

"Yes."

"He was going to annul his marriage to Anora and make you queen."

"Yes."

He nodded tersely, his jaw flexing and his eyes glowing amber as he stared into the firelight. A rigid silence fell, full of expectancy while Rìona waited for his reaction. Thus far he was taking it better than she could have hoped. Then...

"And _Duncan_ knew of this? He... _had_ you, knowing you were all but betrothed to the king?"

"Yes. It was my idea, initially, hatched long before Duncan came to Highever that final time. I set my sights on Cailan when I was only fifteen. My father was a royalist; he supported Cailan even when he could have supplanted him after Maric's death. But all he wanted was to get the king out from under Loghain's sway. As I approached marriageable age, it seemed the perfect opportunity. It was my idea, once I learned about the political equation and how my father was constantly stymied by Loghain's influence and prejudice. I was... very young. Then Howe betrayed us, and Duncan saw an opportunity to turn my... vanity and ambition to his advantage."

She sighed, steeling herself against the familiar pang of guilt she felt at the game she had played. "He humored my desire to marry the king and encouraged me to seduce Cailan, in the hopes that Cailan would become infatuated and prove as easily manipulated by me as he had always been by Anora and her father. The moment was ripe; with pressure to produce an heir mounting and his own authority overshadowed by Anora's competence, Cailan was becoming disenchanted with his queen. It provided me the opening I had waited for all those years, and I succeeded where Duncan himself had failed. I convinced Cailan to withdraw from Ostagar, and fall back and call for reinforcements from Orlais."

Alistair was silent, staring at her with wide, shocked eyes. Though Rìona braced herself, she still flinched when his shout rang through the clearing.

"_Maker's blood!_"

"Alistair—" she held up a hand in supplication, but he glared at her, loathing on his face.

"You lied to me!"

Rìona shook her head adamantly. "No."

"_You_ said this wasn't our fault! That we didn't cause Loghain to betray Cailan!" Furiously, he stomped around the clearing, kicking at rocks and sticks and tufts of brush. Their companions began to emerge from their tents, and Rìona shook her head again, urging them to return to their bedrolls.

"We didn't! I told you before, Loghain's plans were laid well before Ostagar."

"So the fact that you were poised, not only to convince Cailan to invite the Orlesians across the border, but also to supplant his daughter as queen, had nothing to do with it?" he sneered. "You expect me to _believe_ that?"

"Believe what you like," Rìona snapped, her chin lifting in affront. "But the dating of Howe's orders to the elf Berwick, the timing of Arl Eamon's poisoning, the murder of _my own family_, says otherwise. Loghain began clearing the way for his ascent to power before I ever arrived at Ostagar."

"Maybe he laid plans but didn't intend to carry them through, unless Cailan went ahead and summoned Orlesian aid. Did you ever think of that?"

"Can you honestly believe I've thought of anything else?" she answered, her nails digging into her palms as her fists clenched upon her thighs. All the self-recrimination and shame she had felt re-awakened with an angry roar. "That I haven't questioned myself a hundred times, a thousand, to ask if there was aught I might have done to prevent this? Until we encountered Berwick, I was convinced this was all my fault. Not ours. Not yours. _Mine._ I was the one who tipped the balance and swayed Cailan's judgment. _That_ is the burden I carried upon my soul those early weeks after Ostagar when you were too caught up in your own grief over Duncan to notice anything else.

"But the timing doesn't support it," Rìona said, subsiding with a weary sigh. "Howe would not have acted without Loghain's sanction; he's a coward. He would only move if he knew he had someone protecting him from the consequences of his actions. If Howe commissioned Berwick to monitor Arl Eamon's poisoning and moved against my family, he had to have had Loghain's blessing, weeks before that final battle at Ostagar."

She watched as Alistair struggled to formulate another denial, and as his outrage began to bleed away into acceptance of the truth of her words. Then his jaw tightened again, and he asked tersely, "And what about me? Am I supposed to believe that all your... _attentions_... have had nothing to do with my bloodline? Did you just trade a king for a bastard prince, figuring one path to the throne was as good as another?"

The battle against tears was lost as her worst fears were realized. Everything she had dreaded he would come to believe about her was coming to pass, and on this front, she had little to offer beside her own word.

"I knew nothing about your bloodline until you told me, Alistair," she answered, swiping impatiently at her cheeks. "I offered myself to you _once_ and only once, before you told me who your father was. I never made the offer again, nor did I ever pursue you thereafter."

"Oh, really?" he scoffed. "All that business in the Fade, in the Circle Tower, in Denerim outside Goldanna's? What was that, if not pursuit?"

"No. _No!_" Rìona sprang to her feet, her body rigid with indignation. "I will _not_ accept the blame for that, and be damned if you try to force it on me! _You_ chose to aid me in the Circle Tower. _You_ were the one who initiated that kiss in Denerim. Andraste's mercy, I've done everything I could to... discourage... any feelings you might have been developing for me since I learned the truth of your lineage, short of completely ignoring you."

"Strange how your lack of attention feels so much like the opposite."

She closed her eyes, the agony of his disdain so deep she thought she might be ill from it. He wasn't entirely wrong. No matter how hard she'd struggled, she'd been unable to bury her own feelings for him. Everyone had noticed, Zevran, Leliana, Wynne... least of all Alistair himself. How successful could she have been in discouraging his affections when her own refused to be suppressed?

"I don't know what you want me to say, Alistair," she murmured, fighting against any further tears. "I've never lied to you. If I've delayed in telling you the whole truth until now, it's because I feared you would react exactly as you're doing. What little accord we've been able to achieve with one another has been hard enough to come by. I didn't want to jeopardize that fragile peace. Not when you've always been so quick to despise my actions anyway."

Rìona waited in anxious silence as Alistair pivoted to stalk away, and then stopped. His shoulders fell, the tension draining from his body as he turned back to the fire and sank down upon a stump, his shoulders hunched.

"Go get some rest," he muttered grudgingly. "I'm not likely to sleep tonight anyway."

Nodding silently, Rìona turned toward her tent, only to be halted by his voice once more.

"I don't... I don't know if I can forgive this," he said at last, refusing to look at her. "I'm sorry, but this whole differentiation between not lying and not telling the whole truth is nothing but cheap, flimsy semantics and you know it. If you're going to insist I'm more intelligent than I give myself credit for, then don't insult me by expecting me to swallow that sort of rhetorical bilge. You misled me, and you did it deliberately. Even if everything else you've said is true—and I'm really not sure whether or not I believe it is—I don't know how I can trust you after you held something like this back."

"Like you held back the truth about yourself?" Rìona asked defensively, misery warring with indignation. "I never questioned you on that, Alistair. Never blamed you. I could have, but instead I understood. Some truths are too massive, too overwhelming, to confess freely or easily. And sometimes we like to hold something of ourselves back, like the way others perceive us while they remain ignorant of our deepest truths and sins."

He squirmed uncomfortably.

"Maybe it was wrong of me to withhold the truth from you," she conceded. "I've never claimed to be perfect. Hate me if you must, but don't be a hypocrite about it."

She made it into her tent before the tears she'd held in check refused to be denied any longer, before she sank to her knees, her body shaking with silent, anguished sobs. She could feel Zevran in the darkness near her, awake and observing. But he made no effort to comfort her, and Rìona was grateful for the fact. Weeping in the arms of the man who shared her bedroll, about the hopelessness of her love for another man, was too bizarre even for her strange and complicated web of sexual and romantic entanglements.

At length, her tears passed and she removed her armor, sliding shivering beneath the blankets and furs to lie with her back to Zevran. Silence fell, and Rìona began to wonder if Zevran had gone back to sleep, when finally his murmur reached her ears.

"And still you lie to the templar. You do not tell him the real reason why you have held back your truths so long."

"What good would it do?" she asked hollowly, another tear tracing its way from the corner of her eye to the palm of the hand upon which she pillowed her face. "It would only sound like an attempt at manipulation, to confess my feelings for him. It would confirm every suspicion he has about me. And it would lay me bare and defenseless before his hatred."

"Hm."

Another long moment of silence spun out, and then Zevran spoke again. "You know, _Guardiana_, for a woman who claims to feel no shame, you certainly behave as though you expect to be shamed at any given moment."

For that, she had no reply, even though his words echoed through her mind long after he had turned his back to her and his breath evened into the slow, steady rhythm of sleep.


	31. Chapter Thirty One: Mothers

"Will you just _die_, already?" Rìona heard Alistair shout, as he somehow managed to mount the high dragon's back while Sten stabbed it in the rear flank. Zevran was lying on the ground, far on the other side of the dragon which the cultists of Haven had called the reborn Andraste. He'd been knocked unconscious by one of her buffeting wings and flung far away; she didn't know how badly he was injured. Conall was wounded as well, lying with a gash in his side, whining piteously. She forced her concern for them from her mind and loosed another arrow. She didn't know if it was even piercing the beast's hide, or if her arrows were simply being lodged in the dragon's scales.

Beside her, dark magic swirled around Morrigan, oozing toward the dragon, disorienting and confusing the beast whose eggs they had already destroyed, and whose protectors they had slain. Rìona was desperately afraid she had miscalculated when she made the decision to kill the clutching dragon; they would pay dearly, if she had.

Maker, _why_ was she leading a band of fighters, making tactical and strategic decisions, with no knowledge of tactics and strategy? When she'd seen the dragon, all she could think of was the way such a creature had been seen as an omen, a portent in Loghain's favor, driving him to victory at the Battle of River Dane during the Orlesian occupation. The mad cultists aside, if Ferelden saw another dragon rise while they hovered on the brink of civil war, it could change the entire political landscape. The bannorn might assume she was another portent, reminding them of Loghain's past victories. They might give up their resistance to his rule, and then Ferelden would be lost to the Blight while Loghain continued to barricade them against the Orlesians.

Alistair had railed at her for thinking of politics when faced with a _dragon_.

Seeing an opening, Rìona flung a vial of vitriol at the dragon's feet and gave a grin of feral satisfaction as it shattered practically upon her toes. The bulk of the beast's body protected Alistair and Sten from splatter, while the acid began to eat at the dragon's less-protected feet, throwing her off-balance and causing her considerable pain. She roared in agony, whipping her tail about with deadly force. Sten was knocked back, but seemed uninjured as he picked himself up and charged into the fray once again.

With a scream the dragon took to the air, and Rìona sent another arrow flying at her less-armored underbelly, then watched her shadow as it glided over the ground toward Morrigan and herself.

"Rìona! _Move_!" she heard Alistair shout, but Morrigan was in the middle of chanting a spell, a ball of lightning gathering between her hands, and wasn't paying attention to where the dragon was going to land.

Cursing, Rìona charged at Morrigan and knocked her to the ground, trying to thrust her as far from the spot where they had been standing as she possibly could before they both fell. The jolt of the lightning Morrigan had been gathering sizzled through Rìona, making her fingers and toes strangely numb. The ground shuddered as the dragon landed where they had been standing just an instant before, and a massive, scaled tail caught Rìona on the right shoulder as she tried to stagger to her feet, sending her flying across the rocky terrain.

Everything ached, and she felt as if she couldn't draw a proper breath. She could taste blood in her mouth, a great deal of it. When she tried to move, everything within her cried out in pain. Her eyes wouldn't focus properly, she couldn't see the battle, but she heard the dragon scream, and the ground trembled again as the massive scaled body collapsed and the dragon thrashed her dying throes.

She began to cough and spat blood, and her vision began to darken, growing gray at the edges and moving steadily into black.

A clatter of plate armor intruded on the darkness closing around her.

"Rìona! Oh, dear Maker, no. Rìona! Wynne! _Wynne!_" Alistair's voice was high and hysterical. She felt the cool metal of his gauntlets touch her face, and then there was a clanging sound and warm fingers were there instead, pressing against her neck.

"I'm all—" she tried to whisper, but nothing emerged but a choked burble.

More footsteps approached, an unsteady, limping gait. "Is she dead?" she heard Zevran ask, and she felt a flicker of relief that he was well. There was a dark, ragged edge to his question, far from his usual light tone. Alistair muttered a quick denial. Floating in a sea of pain, Rìona wondered deliriously if Alistair realized he was still caressing her face, his fingers warm and trembling against her skin.

"Fool Warden!" Morrigan spat, her strides sounding quick and purposeful as she crossed to them. "What did she think she was doing?"

"Saving your life, by the looks of it!" Leliana retorted hotly.

"Everyone calm down," Wynne said soothingly, and Rìona felt her touch, light and gentle. The healer felt her head first, and then moved down to her chest. Maker, it _hurt_! Even the slightest touch, even through her armor, was agony. Rìona felt the magical pulse Wynne used to ascertain the extent of the various injuries she healed. "Broken ribs—several, I think. At least one has pierced her lung. Morrigan, have you any lyrium potions left? I haven't enough mana for the amount of healing she will need."

There was a pause, a hesitation. It seemed forever until Morrigan answered reluctantly. "Yes. Here."

Whatever Wynne replied then was lost as Rìona's tenuous grasp on consciousness slipped. She felt the warm pulse of healing energy once, and then nothing. 

* * *

She awoke some hours later, within her tent. She didn't remember being moved. They couldn't have traveled far, which meant her companions had made camp in the very shadow of the dragon's massive corpse.

"You're awake," Wynne's gentle voice reached her. She saw the mage sitting at her side, reading a tome they had found in the ruined—and now desecrated—temple that had been built ages ago to honor Andraste. "How are you feeling?"

Experimentally, she tried to move, and cried out in pain. "Sore."

With a small smile, Wynne nodded. "I used the last of our lyrium to heal the most life-threatening of your injuries, the broken ribs and internal bleeding. It was a very near thing; even a few more minutes might have been too late. We reset your dislocated shoulder, but I wasn't able to heal the muscle and tendon damage. Tomorrow, once I've had a chance to rest, I'll attend to it before we move on."

Rìona closed her eyes, unable to speak for a moment past the fear congealing within her. "And... my babe?"

The mage frowned. "There was some damage to the sac that surrounds the babe. You're bleeding slightly, and leaking fluid; Zevran and Leliana noticed it when they removed your armor."

Pain shot through her as a sob erupted from her chest. All her injured and abused muscles clenched in a spasm of agony that perfectly matched her sorrow.

"Shh! Hush, child! You mustn't agitate yourself," Wynne said, squeezing her hand as tears leaked from the corners of Rìona's eyes, running down her temples and into her hair. "I've seen this sort of injury before. A bann's wife fell down some stairs, once, and I was summoned to heal her if I could. If the sac had ruptured completely, there would be nothing I could do, but a leak can be repaired with healing magic. But I'm out of mana and there's no more lyrium. For now, the babe still lives. I can feel its presence within you. If the babe survives until morning, when my mana is restored, I can heal this."

Her voice was clogged with tears as Rìona asked, "And what are the chances of that happening?"

"I... don't know. I'm sorry, child. The longer you continue to lose the fluid that sustains the babe, or the worse the bleeding becomes, the less likely it is to survive. And the leak seems to be... increasing. This is why you mustn't move or become too agitated. You don't want to make it worse."

"Is there nothing more we can do in the meantime?"

"No, I'm sorry," Wynne said sadly. "Alistair tried to insist that Morrigan invoke her... sex magic... to help me replenish my mana. And as much as it pains me to admit it, I have drastically misjudged Zevran. Despite the fact that he has an unhealed broken arm that must be hurting him dreadfully, _he_ said he would perform the ritual with Morrigan, or me, or anyone else necessary. Leliana volunteered as well, and I would have consented myself if it had come to that, but Morrigan refused to perform or even teach us the ritual. She said she had always felt your decision to carry the child was foolish. She would not be party to saving it, and claimed that if it died then that was no doubt for the best. After you saved her life, even. Honestly, I can't begin to understand what passes for a conscience with her."

Another tear trickled into Rìona's hair as she nodded. "Thank you anyway, Wynne. I... appreciate that so many of you were willing to aid me. Perhaps Morrigan is right. Perhaps I've been... foolish and selfish and... oh, _Maker_, Wynne!"

Though she struggled not to move, her sobs caught in her throat, until Rìona was certain they would choke her if she did not give them vent. Wynne shushed her, holding her hand and patting her face as she lay there and wept for the fading of what little hope she still possessed.

Hours passed in a strange sort of vigil, and it seemed that, with each one, Rìona felt her child slipping away. Her chest felt hollow as she submitted to Wynne's examinations without comment, parting her legs to let the mage check the amount of blood and fluid she was losing, or lifting her shirt to let Wynne rest her hand upon Rìona's belly, sending a faint, inquiring pulse of magic into her womb to see if the babe nestled there still lived. It was all her depleted mana would allow for. Each time, she smiled and nodded that yes, the child was alive. But each time, the worry-lines etched about Wynne's eyes grew deeper.

Rìona prayed. Not to the perverted and vengeful incarnation of Andraste the cultists of Haven had worshipped in the form of a high dragon, but to the woman who had been the Bride of the Maker, the slave who had fractured the power of the mighty Tevinter magisters with chants and songs of the light the Maker's return would bring. Surely here in this place, on this mountaintop where Her ashes had rested for centuries, Andraste might hear such a prayer.

She had no way of knowing what time it was. Alistair had come and gone hours ago with an offer of food that Rìona had refused. But then there were voices whispering urgently outside her tent, and Leliana crawled through the flap. There was little room for her, but she crowded in anyway, and Zevran sat just outside, peering in.

"Perhaps this might help," Leliana said in a tone of grim satisfaction, handing Wynne a blue vial.

"Where did you find a lyrium potion?" Wynne asked, stunned. She uncorked the vial and drank it in a single gulp.

Leliana made an irritated sound. "Morrigan lied when she said she had no more. Alistair didn't believe her—he was certain he remembered seeing her take some from the cultists we slew. So he took us aside and proposed a plan. Since Zevran's arm is injured, it fell to me to carry it out. It's been a some time since I've... appropriated anything from a person's packs while they were sitting mere yards away, but I think I managed rather nicely, yes?"

Rìona gave a tearful, choked laugh, seizing Leliana's hand in a joyful grasp as one of Wynne's hands settled on her belly and she felt the warm tingle of healing energy begin to pulse through her. At Wynne's command, she raised her knees and parted her legs. The mage's other hand rested over her sex, two fingers sliding into her and moving until Wynne found the entrance to Rìona's womb. Another pulse of energy, strange and cramping and uncomfortable, began deep inside her, and Wynne bowed her head, muttering a soft incantation as pulse after pulse flowed through Rìona.

"There," Wynne said at last, withdrawing her hands and helping Rìona to right her clothing, though she had little to preserve by way of modesty. "Your child lives, and Maker willing, will continue to do so. Forgive me for still not tending to your aches and bruises, but I think it would be best if I heal Zevran's arm and save the rest for morning."

Rìona nodded, and Wynne carefully maneuvered past her to Zevran where he still sat in the opening of the tent. Only then did Rìona notice Alistair hovering behind him, an expression of profound relief upon his face that quickly gave way to something more stoic when she caught his eye. Rìona offered him a grateful, trembling smile, but Alistair merely nodded gravely and walked away.

"Thank you," Rìona murmured, looking at Leliana who sat beside her, beaming. "Thank you."

Leliana bent down to hug her and Rìona winced with discomfort. But when the bard made to pull away, Rìona kissed her once upon the mouth. Not a kiss of passion, but of affection and joy and gratitude. It lingered a moment before Leliana broke away, ducking her head with a small smile. Behind her, Zevran tsked.

"Cruel women!" he chided teasingly. "Doing that when I am too distracted, and in too much pain, to watch and appreciate."

"You'll simply need to find your pleasures another way," Leliana informed him archly, rising. "I'm going to get some rest. Good night."

Shortly afterward, Wynne left as well. Zevran sat in the entrance of Rìona's tent, stretching and testing the range of motion of his healed arm with a dagger in-hand.

"I will be sitting watch all night, tonight," he said quietly.

"But you've been injured," Rìona protested. "You were unconscious for some time; you ought to rest."

Zevran shook his head in denial, staring at her with flat, cold eyes. His assassins' eyes. "I want your permission to kill the witch."

Rìona startled. "Why?"

"You need to ask?"

"Nothing's changed. We have no proof she's done anything to harm me."

"What do you call today?"

Rìona frowned thoughtfully. "I call today Morrigan's warped sense of survival. You haven't heard all the tales of the things she was taught by Flemeth. She has no concept of loyalty or camaraderie. She would not waste her last lyrium potion saving my child, when she's never agreed with my decision not to rid myself of the babe in the first place. For that matter, maybe she has a point. What if our lives depend on that potion in battle tomorrow? Was it uncharitable of her? Yes. But an attempt on my life?" Rìona shook her head. "No. If I thought it was, I'd deal with her myself. But she denied Wynne the lyrium potion that would prevent me losing my babe, not the one she needed to heal _me_."

"It is a near thing," Zevran waved a dismissive hand. "It may be time to make an example, _Guardiana_. How much longer can you keep your party together unless they begin to fear you a little? You barely managed to sweet-talk our Sten out of revolting back in Haven. There is a reason the Crows are the power behind the Antivan nobility, and that is because Antivans know there is a time to move against your adversaries before they can move against you."

Rìona smiled and took the hand in which he did not hold a dagger, kissing the palm. "There's a reason why the courtesans are the _other_ power behind the Antivan nobility," she murmured. "And that is because there is also a time to try to make your adversaries love you, and turn them into allies."

There was a pause, then Zevran laughed softly. "Ah, _querida!_ So this is how you ensnare your prizes. You will have us all eating out of your hand, yes? Alistair, Leliana, Wynne, me—even Sten, though he will never admit it. They should have warned me when I took the contract on you, that the Warden's most potent weapon is not her dagger, but her sheath."

"Get some rest, Zevran. Morrigan will not attack me tonight. Give me some time to deal with her in my own way." Zevran nodded and crawled into the tent, closing the flap behind him. As he removed his armor and clothing, she amended, "But keep your daggers sharp and ready. I may yet have need of them." 

* * *

"I have a question, if you will indulge me."

Rìona looked up, startled. She hadn't heard Morrigan approach. But then, she'd been staring into the as dawn lightened the sky, her hand resting over the still-small swell on her lower belly, full of wonderment at its continued presence. She grimaced, feeling she was caught on the wrong foot. She wasn't ready to confront Morrigan yet.

"What is it?" she asked shortly. Despite what she had said to Zevran, she couldn't help but feel resentful of Morrigan's callous disregard for anything but her own well-being. Withholding that lyrium potion had been a petty, selfish thing to do.

"Is it still your intention to deal with Flemeth?"

"Why should we?" Alistair demanded, stepping out of his tent with his cloak wrapped tightly around him. Though they were sheltered from the worst of the wind by a rock-face, it was frigid atop the mountain. "What possible reason could we have for endangering ourselves protecting you from Flemeth when you're perfectly willing to let any, or all, of us hang if it suits your purposes?"

"'Twas not a question for _you_," Morrigan snapped at him, turning her attention back to Rìona.

"But it's a valid query nonetheless, Morrigan," Rìona answered coolly. "You may have no appreciation for concepts such as friendship or loyalty, but perhaps the term 'reciprocity' has some meaning for you? If you will not risk yourself to help us in our need, why should you expect us to do the same for you?"

"I don't," the witch answered, refusing to meet Rìona's eyes. "'Tis why I asked. If you no longer intend to help me, I must deal with Flemeth on my own."

It was tempting. So very tempting, to send Morrigan on her way, to tell her to do her own dirty work. All her life she'd struggled not to give in to the urge to be vindictive, always trying to take the higher road, the noble path, the path her mother—gracious and kind despite the disgrace and ignominy she had endured in her youth—had taught her.

But she couldn't. Not in the face of Morrigan's utter lack of concern for anyone but herself. Not after the months of barbs and sneers and mockery. Not after what Rìona had almost lost to Morrigan's self-centered worldview.

Her hand drifted to her belly again, protectively. She had yet to feel her child move, and yet she knew the babe was there, and beloved.

So easy. So easy to refuse, and watch Morrigan walk away to wherever her fate might lead her. So easy to be rid of her and the dischord she wrought.

"We will still confront Flemeth," Rìona stated, ignoring Alistair's incredulous yelp. "But we do not do it for your sake."

"Care to explain that?" Alistair demanded angrily. Rìona sensed, rather than heard, Zevran's presence behind her and knew he had emerged from her tent and joined them, standing protectively at her shoulder. "I think the rest of us deserve to know why we're going to be risking our lives for something that has no bearing on our ability to confront the Blight."

"I gave my word," she answered with a calm she didn't feel, "and my word is always good. I won't damage my credibility now, certainly not out of spite, not even spite for Morrigan. But there's more to it than that.

"I owe you an apology, Alistair." Rìona looked down for a moment, then met his eyes squarely. "I've owed it to you since the Circle Tower, really. I've struggled so long in my life against the strictures of the Chantry with regards to pleasure, that I never really listened to what you were saying about the dangers of magic. I figured it was all part of your indoctrination, all simply Chantry-born drivel not worth hearing. Because of Aodhán  
I was inclined to think well of almost all mages. But, in some regards you were right, and what we've seen—at the Circle, with Avernus, with those blood mages in Denerim, and even here in Haven—confirms it. The Chantry may be too harsh in their methods, but the principle is sound. I've been too cavalier in my disregard for corrupt magic."

Alistair looked astonished at her admission. Rìona gave him a moment to absorb it, until he nodded once, urging her to continue.

"What Flemeth is, and what Flemeth does, is absolutely evil. If it's not Morrigan whose body she claims, it will be another. We must stop that. We must not allow it to continue, this cycle of passing into another body, lifetime after lifetime, prolonging her life at the expense of another. It must end."

There was more she could say, more she could try to explain. She could try to tell him that just as people like Avernus and Uldred made the plight of mages worse by practicing corrupt magic, the power of sexual magic wielded by Flemeth and Morrigan was also doing damage. Because of it, the Chantry had begun placing restrictions not only the practice of magic, but also on the most basic of human behaviors. Pleasure and desire, the most glorious of the Maker's gifts, the very gifts from which life itself sprung, were being shrouded in shame and sin because somewhere along the way, the Chantry had learned of the nature of Flemeth's magic. How she would deal with Morrigan, Rìona didn't yet know. But there was no question what had to be done about Flemeth.

All this, she wanted to tell Alistair, but she held back. He was still so _angry_ with her, his behavior since her injury not withstanding. Angry at her for seducing Cailan and carrying his child, angry for making him care for her without being able to belong to him. Those were reasons he wouldn't understand. He wasn't ready, not with his rage still buffeting her like the wings of the dragon they had slain.

But despite his rage, he'd instigated the scheme that had saved her babe. Truly, his goodness humbled her.

Alistair hesitated, then looked thoughtful as he nodded again. "All right. I can accept that."

Rìona gave him a small, solemn smile, then looked up at Morrigan, allowing some of her resentment and disdain to show. "Once we're done here, attempting to collect the Ashes and deliver them to Redcliffe, we'll head south to confront Flemeth. Was there anything else you needed?"

"I..." For once, Morrigan stammered, surprised and caught off-guard. "No," she said finally, collecting herself. "That will be quite sufficient."

"Good. Then let's be on our way."


	32. Chapter Thirty Two: Regret

Regret.

Was that the name of this feeling, this sickening sense deep in her stomach that somewhere, something had gone... amiss?

Morrigan didn't know. "Regret," like "love" and "friendship," was one of those ridiculous contrivances that seemed specifically intended to get in the way of one's survival. As she had told the Warden more than once: power mattered. Survival mattered. Therefore it stood to reason that, if one lived one's life doing what was necessary to ensure one's own power and survival, there should be no cause for regret. Flemeth certainly knew none.

Why, then, did she feel so uneasy as they faced this Guardian, this strange spirit intended to protect the relic they had come seeking. He questioned each of the Warden's companions in their turn, honing in on their deepest regrets, using their guilt like a bludgeon against them. That alone should have told them that regret was a foolish, destructive sentiment to be eschewed at all costs, but the idiots persisted, first and foremost the Warden herself.

"... There is suffering in your past, and betrayal. You claim to loathe deception, and avoid it at all costs. But you lied to the father of your babe and played a role in the hopes of becoming queen. Do you believe there is anything you could have done differently to prevent all that came after?"

The Warden flinched and looked stricken. "I don't know!" she answered, a sharp edge to her voice. "I was barely more than a child when I set my sights on the king, and when I came to Ostagar, I clung to that goal because it was the only thing I had left of the life I had known. I never stopped to think what might be affected, or if I'd even be a particularly good queen. Perhaps Alistair is right; perhaps Loghain would have turned from his course if I'd not seduced the king and convinced him to summon reinforcements from Orlais. For so many years, my father talked of Loghain's paranoia and hatred of the Orlesians. Perhaps I should have known. Perhaps all that has come after _is_ my doing."

Predictably, they rushed to comfort her, the insipid bard, and the preachy Circle mage. Even the qunari, protesting about leaving regrets in the past. For once, they spoke sense, though it seemed to Morrigan to be misdirected. The elf—a most unlikely protector for the Warden, or so Morrigan once would have assumed—favored the spirit with an irritated quip about self-flagellation, while Alistair, the fool templar, squirmed uncomfortably.

Finally, he spoke. "We can't know what all the consequences of our actions are," he said grudgingly. "Maybe things would have been different. Or maybe I'm wrong, and you're right, and everything would have been the same; but if you're to blame, then so was Duncan." The templar's voice was particularly heavy and gruff as he spoke those words. "So were a lot of us, because we were _all_ hoping Cailan would decide to bring in the Orlesians."

The sappy look of gratitude and relief the Warden gave him was nearly sickening. Morrigan rolled her eyes and asked caustically, "Is there any religion that does not thrive upon guilt like a glutton at his lunch?"

But she was ignored, as so often seemed the case. The Warden and her party were foolish creatures who reveled in the very things which made them feel the most wretched.

Morrigan realized that she almost wished the Warden had refused to help her with Flemeth. Better she should have to deal with her mother by herself, than continue to endure these ridiculous people and their insufferable sentimentality.

It would be easier, also, than to remain amongst them, face them, with them knowing what she had attempted to do. Particularly as she must continue to do so, if the opportunity arose. She did not like the feeling of so many suspicious eyes upon her. Did not like the feeling that perhaps she was _wrong_.

Regret? No, surely it couldn't be that.

One by one, the Guardian questioned them, and one by one Morrigan watched them succumb to their own weakness, wallowing in remorse and self-doubt. Zevran's reaction was perhaps the most intriguing, for he bristled defensively and cut off the Guardian before the spirit could finish phrasing the question it intended to ask.

"Yes. The answer is yes, if that is what you wish to know," the elf snapped. "Now move on."

Interesting. So the assassin had regrets as well, regrets about which he didn't want their company to know. Regrets about a woman whose name he did not want mentioned.

She should have been trying to turn that to her advantage, Morrigan thought, trying to figure out how to use it to detach the elf's protective presence from the Warden's side and make her vulnerable. But, instead, she stood there watching anxiously as the Guardian's attention progressed to the next companion.

Panic. How very odd. In an instant, this spirit could lay all her secrets and schemes bare. But why should she fear it so? At worst, they would attack and try to kill her, and she would be forced to defend herself or flee. It would be detrimental to her purposes, yes, but certainly it was nothing worthy of all this concern. Why, then, did her cursed palms persist in sweating?

"And you, Morrigan, Flemeth's daughter. What—"

"Begone, spirit," Morrigan said irritably, though she strove to sound dismissive and unconcerned. "I will not play your games."

To her astonishment, the Guardian did not insist, and the way was opened to them.

Strange. As they passed into the next chamber, Morrigan almost wished that the Guardian _had_ insisted, or that she had let him spill her secrets. It would have been a relief, to have it all out in the open.

Perhaps that was why the Warden claimed she did not like deceit. 

* * *

Morrigan had high hopes for the Warden, when first she spied her.

It had been dark, at the time. Morrigan had taken on the form of a wolf, prowling the night-filled Korcari Wilds, when she smelled smoke, and the presence of beings who were not darkspawn. Drawing closer, she saw the Warden, coupling with one of her fellow Grey Wardens against a tree. When they were finished, the Warden had casually walked away, dismissing the man from her mind.

Morrigan thought perhaps she had found a kindred spirit, someone who knew her power and how to use it, as Morrigan herself did. Someone who was not mired down by sentimentality and squeamishness.

It had been a pity to discover she was wrong.

Still, Morrigan mused, as the Warden and her party made their way down the mountain with a pouch of ashes in the Warden's pack, there was something she would miss about the Warden. She once asked Morrigan if growing up in the Korcari Wilds had been lonely, and Morrigan conceded that it had. But it wasn't until the Warden ceased making her... _overtures_... that Morrigan became aware of a lack of companionship in her own life. The Warden was infuriating, of course, in her insistence on putting value to nonsensical things such as friendship and affection, and yet, once Morrigan succeeded in driving her away, she felt the... lack of those tentative gestures of friendship she had lost.

She didn't like the feeling. It felt too much like dependence. It felt too much like vulnerability.

Moreover, it was the result of what had been a critical tactical error on Morrigan's part. Had she attempted to befriend the Warden, or endear herself to the Warden as the elf had done, she might have succeeded in her objective of sabotaging the Warden's pregnancy months ago. But Morrigan had found it patently impossible to feign friendship with the Warden while plotting against her. She felt certain that the moment she let down her guard and met the Warden's eyes, it would all be given away. So she had driven the Warden away with barbs and insults, and thereafter felt the vague and haunting notion that something was incomplete.

'Twas most odd, and not a little disturbing.

Morrigan had a chance to watch the Warden at work, on the journey from the mountains to the dirty village called Redcliffe. For they stopped in a town called Honnleath which had been overrun by darkspawn. There, the Warden acquired a golem, a walking, speaking creature made of stone by the ironic name of Shale. The thing was supposed to have come with a control rod, but it turned out to be broken. Which meant that when it followed them out of the village, it did so of its own free will.

Then the Warden set about _befriending_ it. It was then that Morrigan despaired of ever understanding the Warden's reasons or methods. With sex as her primary weapon, it was little wonder that the Warden had the templar, the assassin and even the bard hanging on her every word. More surprising were Wynne and the qunari. But a _golem?_ What could she possibly have to offer it, or desire from it?

But there the Warden was, talking to it night after night. Asking it questions about its past, its opinions. No matter how brusque and insulting the thing was, the Warden persisted, and the golem began to respond. Not because she drew it to her with sex, but just by virtue of being interested in it.

Morrigan couldn't begin to fathom why. Certainly, a golem would be an advantageous ally, but surely it would have made more sense to find a way to have the control rod repaired than to try to win the loyalty and friendship of a piece of _stone?_

Maddening. Utterly maddening.

"Tell me," Morrigan asked caustically in camp one night after supper, "will you seduce the golem as well?"

The Warden smiled. It wasn't her normal smile, the open one full of warmth and charm that she so regularly plied. There was a hungry edge to this one, and Morrigan had learned that it was the one with which the Warden deflected insults and frequently turned them back upon the one from whence they came. It was the Warden at her most dangerous.

"My, my. That _would_ be perverse, wouldn't it?" The Warden smacked her lips, as though relishing the idea. "I've already fucked a hedge-witch and a few abominations. A golem just might round things out nicely. What do you think? Those lightning crystals could be... intriguing."

It took Morrigan a moment to recognize the comparison being made, and by then the Warden was already sliding her next dagger home.

"Of course, Shale might turn out to be more responsive, at least more so than you were. Tell me, why _did_ you hold yourself back from that ritual in Redcliffe?"

Caught. So this was what it felt like to be caught in a trap. This moment of blind panic, of not knowing what to say, or where to turn. Of all the possible betrayals she might have expected the Warden to call her upon, that was one she had never considered.

"I had to... to keep my wits about me. For the ritual," Morrigan finally replied, and to her own ears it sounded weak and flimsy.

But the Warden simply nodded, looking calm and thoughtful. "Hm. And yet the ritual proceeded quite nicely even once you finally lost your... reserve. Interesting. One might have thought you were holding out for Jowan to cut too thoroughly."

"And why would I do that?" Morrigan asked tightly.

"That is the question now, isn't it?" the Warden replied, her voice light but her eyes flashing like daggers in the firelight before she walked away. Morrigan could not mistake the fact that a warning had been issued.

Her time remaining in the Warden's company was growing very short indeed. 

* * *

It all had seemed so simple when Flemeth set her upon her task. Get the Warden to consume an abortifacient. It should have been accomplished before they ever left Flemeth's abode in the Korcari Wilds. Somehow, though, the Warden always failed to drink the potion prepared for her. When Morrigan realized she'd been too hasty in rejecting the Warden's overtures of friendship and therefore lost any chance at securing the Warden's trust, she tried to entice the assassin in the hopes that he might aid her, but the elf had proven absurdly loyal for one of his profession.

And then, it had been too late. The Warden's pregnancy progressed to the point where a simple herbal concoction would have been an uncertain proposition, unless given in such strength and quantity that it might have made the Warden deathly ill.

Of course, it had come down to that anyway. She'd been reduced to attempting to arrange accidents for the Warden, even if they cost the Warden her life. A hex to push her off-balance in battle or while sparring, trying to drain her energy with sex magic so that she would be clumsy and careless. It wasn't that she bore the Warden any ill will, of course. But if she could not succeed in ridding herself of the babe, she must rid herself of the mother. She only needed one Grey Warden for her plans to come to fruition, after all, so long as that one Grey Warden was male.

It would have been simpler if she could have just killed the Warden, but that would certainly have meant Alistair, and rest of the party, would have fallen upon Morrigan and attempted to slay her. Even if she escaped with her life, it would ultimately be pointless, for they—particularly Alistair—would never trust Morrigan enough to meet the other part of her objective.

That outcome, though, was looking ever more probable, despite all Morrigan's efforts. For once the Warden discovered Morrigan's scheme, it would all be for naught. And Flemeth would make certain the Warden knew. 

* * *

Matters within the party were strangely peaceful on the journey back to Redcliffe after acquiring the ashes. Alistair, who had been in a foul temper since they had left Denerim, seemed to have found some measure of resignation during their encounter with the Guardian. He no longer glared at the Warden and muttered resentfully when she retired to her tent with the elf. If he wasn't happy, neither was he persistently angry any longer.

It was a pity. His anger and discomfiture had been much more entertaining, and made a much better target for Morrigan to tweak his temper with her insults.

That peace ended once they reached Redcliffe.

The first fracture appeared when Alistair realized the Warden did not intend to pass the night with Zevran, but rather with Bann Teagan. He stared, astonished, when the Warden greeted the Bann with a smile and a kiss, glancing in confusion at the elf, who watched the embrace with bland nonchalance.

"Come!" the bann urged, taking the Warden's arm. "Rooms are being prepared for you, but while we wait, tell me, how fared your quest?"

They were drawn into the study to reveal the results of their search for Andraste's ashes. A priest was summoned to confer with Wynne on the best way to employ the healing powers of the ashes, and the Warden and her company were shown to their chambers to bathe and prepare for supper. Once the servant had left, Morrigan saw Alistair note the fact that the Warden was shown to the bann's own chamber, his face reddening.

"How do you tolerate that?" she heard him demand of the assassin later. "First you pimp her out in Denerim and now you just stand by while she—!"

"_La Guardiana_ does not belong to me," Zevran replied casually. "Nor would I want her to, for that matter."

Growling in disgust, Alistair stormed away, slamming the door to his chamber. She thought the assassin would leave as well, but he surprised Morrigan by addressing her over his shoulder.

"I find sleeping indoors disquieting, after so long in the open," he remarked lightly, apropos of nothing. Slowly, he turned to face her and gave her an unmistakable head-to-foot perusal. "I imagine you feel much the same, yes?"

Morrigan's lips curled into an alluring smile as she sensed the opening she had waited for. The elf's easy acceptance of the Warden's defection was only a façade. Jealousy was a tool she could use, and too good a chance to miss, particularly if she could arrange a mishap for the Warden and blame it on the assassin. She hadn't looked for this chance, true, but she would be a fool to let it pass, this opportunity to detach the Warden's protector from her and possibly gain an ally in her endeavors.

"I do, in fact," she replied, tilting her head to the side as she studied the assassin. It wouldn't be a hardship to exert herself on his account. "'Tis nearly impossible for me to rest in such a place. I imagine I shall be awake all night, seeking _something_ to while away the hours."

"Ahh, I thought as much." A satisfied sigh in his voice, Zevran slunk toward her, meeting her smile with his own. There wasn't an inch of him that did not exude sensual danger. Little wonder the Warden was so fond of his services. "Perhaps we might be... restless together?"

Thus she found herself entertaining the elf in her chamber. He was as energetic and skilled as his boasts had indicated, demanding and wont to play rough. Morrigan was well pleased. It was late, late in the night, long after the rest of the castle was silent, when the elf left her bed and began to dress.

"Perhaps you might stay," she offered, attempting a simpering tone. "We need to discuss what this signifies in terms of your affair with the Warden. Perhaps we might be of benefit to each other. Dawn is some ways off. I see no reason to end our fun just yet."

"And I see no reason to stay," he replied in a bored tone after he had finished dressing. He stood by the door, his hand poised on the latch. He turned to face her, and his eyes were cold, flat and empty. Assassin's eyes. "As _amusing_ as this was, the Warden and her bann should be asleep by now. Therefore it is of no consequence if your... restlessness... should take you wandering outside their chamber."

He was gone before she had decided whether or not she could get away with killing him.

The Warden and Alistair spent the next two days closeted with the revived Arl and his brother, plotting political matters Morrigan couldn't care less about. And then they were on the road again, this time bound south for Ostagar and after that, the Korcari Wilds to confront Flemeth.

Once they stopped to make camp for the night, the tension that had been brewing since their arrival in Redcliffe boiled over as Alistair stomped toward the Warden to confront her.

"Why didn't you tell Arl Eamon about your child?" he demanded.

"I beg your pardon?"

"You hung me out to dry!" Alistair accused. "When Eamon began talking of making me king, you said nothing. _You're_ carrying the royal heir, but you didn't say a word!"

"I'm _not_ carrying the royal heir," the Warden snapped back defensively. "I'm carrying a bastard whose paternity I can't prove. What precisely do you believe I ought to have told the arl?"

"Don't give me that! Maker's blood!" the templar shouted, pacing agitatedly. "I've seen you at work. You could talk the blasted birds down from the trees if you wanted to. For that matter, I'm half-convinced all it would really take to end this Blight is for you to smile at the archdemon and ask nicely for it to turn around and head back into the Deep Roads! Don't tell me you couldn't have found a way. Cailan already has a child, or will soon enough. That means I'm now second in the succession again. I _can't_ be king!"

The Warden shook her head emphatically, arguing, "Even if the babe were legitimate, it wouldn't matter. Despite Loghain's efforts to establish a new precedent, no monarch has ever sat upon the Fereldan throne without the consent of the Landsmeet. Ferelden places no great stock in the concept of primogeniture. There's very little chance that the Landsmeet will approve a regency for an infant heir in the midst of a crisis when there is an adult heir available, even one who is illegitimate. Especially not when the adult heir happens to have the unique skills necessary to deal with the crisis."

"_What_ skills? Being a Grey Warden does not qualify me to run a nation!"

"It qualifies you far more than Loghain or Anora, neither one of whom is doing a damned thing to contain this Blight, because they're too busy trying to strip the bannorn of their sovereign rights. If you lack any knowledge of statecraft, blame your father and Arl Eamon, not me. They're the ones who failed in their duty to prepare you for precisely this eventuality. _No_ king's life is certain. They should have been teaching you what you needed to know, rather than hiding you away and making you afraid to lead."

The Warden drew a deep breath and relaxed from her confrontational pose, unclenching her fists and rolling her shoulders. "You were wronged, Alistair. Deeply wronged. They _crippled_ you when they should have been teaching you to be strong. And I'm sorry for that, more sorry than I can possibly say. But I can't take on this burden for you. I've led us, though I was woefully unqualified to act as a general or strategist. I've tried to gather our army, and I'll continue to do so for as long as I may. But even if I could prove Cailan was the father of my babe, I can say nothing to the arl about that. We were never formally betrothed, so carrying his child merely makes me a loose woman who fell into the king's bed on the eve of war. At best, it changes nothing. At worst, however, it makes me and my babe seem like rivals to Arl Eamon's bid to put you on the throne. How strongly will he support our efforts, if he perceives me as a threat?"

"He wouldn't do that!" the templar protested, still tense and ready to quarrel. "He's a good man."

The Warden bowed her head. "As you say," she murmured softly, then peered up at him. "Duncan. Eamon. Strange, Alistair, how often you seem to come under the influence of _good men_ whose objectives happen to conveniently be met by using you for their own ends."

"What is that supposed to mean? Do you really intend to disparage Duncan now, as well?"

"No. Not at all. I just wonder, sometimes, what it will take for you to begin deciding your fate for yourself, rather than being dictated to by whoever happens to be flinging you a few crumbs of kindness. Good night."

Morrigan watched as the Warden walked away, disappointed that the row had not devolved into something more acrimonious and entertaining. Her mind turned over the possibilities. Perhaps she had been going about matters the wrong way. Was there a way she could turn Alistair against the Warden and drive her out, or at least lure Alistair away from her, so that they might strike out on their own, Morrigan and Alistair together? Or perhaps she could use the knowledge of the Warden's babe's paternity somehow, sharing the secret with this Arl Eamon in the hopes that he might act against the Warden?

But, no. The first option left Morrigan with the unendurable prospect of untold months alone with the idiot templar, and none of those scenarios did anything to address what might happen if the Warden should confront the archdemon with the babe still in her belly.

Blast and damnation.

They continued south, and Morrigan felt her time drawing ever shorter. In her shelter at night, Morrigan imagined what might happen when the Warden confronted her mother.

_"So, lovely Morrigan has at last found someone willing to dance to her tune. Or... perhaps not. She never convinced you to drink one of her potions, I see. Perhaps you'd like to know the truths she's not telling you, hm? I could be convinced to part with them... for the right price."_

Perhaps the best option would be to admit the truth, and explain her reasons. But why should the Warden believe her? She'd done nothing to win her trust. The elf suspected her, and the Warden as well. No, they would simply attempt to slay Morrigan, or drive her out that much sooner. Even if the Warden did believe her, she would never rid herself of the babe. It was too late for such to be an option now.

Instead, all Morrigan could do was wait and hope, or pre-emptively flee. Neither option gave her any sense of complacency. Either way, she still felt that nagging sense of loss. As they made their way through the masses of darkspawn at Ostagar to salvage the Fereldan king's effects, as the Korcari Wilds drew nearer, she began to understand why.

Given the chance, the Warden might have been a friend, or perhaps even a sister. It might be the only chance in her life Morrigan had to experience such a thing. But... no. In the end, they were too much alike, she and the Warden, to ever be more than rivals.

Struggling with her vague sense of unease, Morrigan realized that she did know regret, after all.


	33. Chapter Thirty Three: Counterpoint

_Author's Note: Since this is a pretty important chapter, I'm posting it early, to give people plenty of time to read it before things get crazy on Tuesday. That, and I'm hoping me and my sinuses will be in bed tonight before the time at which I would usually post._

_

* * *

_

It was strange, Alistair thought, the way they all fell into rank behind Rìona as she confronted Morrigan. She hadn't ordered them to do so, and though he and Sten were trained to such precise forms, the others were not. But still, they did it. Leliana and Wynne took the ends where nothing could obstruct their fire. He and Sten stood closer to the center, flanking Rìona and ready to charge forward with a smite and a bellow if Morrigan seemed ready to cast. Zevran stood directly at her back with magebane poison coating his blades, poised to slip into the shadows and circle behind the apostate. Only Shale stood slightly apart, hefting a boulder nearly the size of Alistair's torso, ready to hurl it.

But in the end, it was Rìona alone who confronted Morrigan, stepping forward ahead of the line they formed.

"You return from the Wilds," Morrigan said slowly, cautiously, taking in the unambiguous statement they made at Rìona's back. "Have you any news?"

"I've kept my word. Flemeth is dead, or as near as she may come to it," Rìona answered, and Alistair couldn't recall her ever speaking so coldly. She threw the grimoire down onto the frosty ground at Morrigan's feet. "I've dealt with you far more honestly than you've dealt with me."

"I see Mother has been telling tales." Morrigan's voice held a touch of exasperation, and not a little uncertainty. "No doubt she wished to make you doubt me, hoping to bargain for her life."

Rìona gave a dismissive shake of her head. "She only confirmed what I already suspected but could never prove. You've been attempting to sabotage me. At first I assumed it was simply because you believed I would be unable to continue to act as a Grey Warden, against the Blight, whilst carrying my babe. But no, there's more to it than that, or else you would not have escalated your efforts in attempting to make me lose the babe, nearly to the point of costing me my life."

"Did Flemeth tell you it was _she_ who set me upon the task? 'Twas for that very reason that I accompanied you, at her behest."

"Don't insult my intelligence!" Rìona snapped. "You've had no qualms about thwarting Flemeth's designs when it suited your purpose. You could have veered from your course at any time, had you chosen to do so. Instead, you set your mind upon betrayal."

Morrigan nodded in acceptance of the indictment. "There are reasons for what I have done. Reasons of which I think you should be aware."

Again, Rìona shook her head, a sharp jerk that negated any possibility of further discussion. "No. Were such reasons relevant, you would have been better served to share them before resorting to treachery, when I would have been inclined to listen. I tried to befriend you, Morrigan. To respect you even when our viewpoints vastly differed. I tried to show you that there was value in camaraderie and fellowship, that one need not walk through life on a lonely path such as the one Flemeth set you upon. I tried to show you that survival is not the only imperative worth fighting for. I risked my life, that of my babe, and those of my people, in order to defend you from Flemeth's designs. An explanation was the least I merited, but that time has now passed. You've fought beside us and, for that, I am not going to have you slain." At his side, Alistair heard a soft hiss from Zevran, though he said nothing to undermine Rìona's declaration. For once, he found he was in total agreement with the assassin. "But I will not have a traitor in our midst. I want you gone. You will gather your things this instant and leave, tonight. If any of my people happens to catch a glimpse of you in our vicinity again, they have my blessing to kill you on sight."

Morrigan hung her head for a moment, and in that moment it almost seemed as though she might feel regret. But it quickly passed, and she turned her cold, impassive gaze upon Rìona once more. "So be it. May you find your victory on your own."

With her arms folded over her chest, Rìona watched her prepare to depart. It didn't take long; Morrigan traveled light, her ability to assume animal form reducing her need for spare clothing and warm bedding. They stood there, still in a single, defensive line behind their leader, for the few minutes it took, and then Morrigan stood before Rìona again. She paused, as though on the verge of saying something, then thought better of it and walked away into the cold, wintry twilight.

Strange. Morrigan spent so much of her time irate, and yet there was nothing angry about her leave-taking. She did not rail or argue. She simply accepted it.

Once the witch was gone, their companions began to drift away, erecting tents and preparing supper. But still Rìona stood there, staring at the embers of Morrigan's campfire and the rough shelter she had constructed while waiting for them to return from the Korcari Wilds. In the end, only Alistair remained standing at her shoulder, waiting for her.

"Go," she murmured, glancing over her shoulder at him. "I'll be along in a moment."

He ought to say something. He'd never liked Morrigan and he'd made no secret of that fact, but still... In the face of such betrayal, surely he had something comforting he could say, some way to offer her solace. But he could think of nothing.

Alistair left.

* * *

Zevran was watchful as he helped set up their camp for the night, peering at the Warden out of the corner of his eye as she slowly made her way toward the circle of tents they were constructing. Her eyes were sorrowful and troubled, and he shook his head in disapproval of the incredible risk she had taken.

Soft. Too soft by half for what she must do. The witch's betrayal had taught her nothing.

She stoically helped finish setting up the camp, though she was clearly uninterested in the proceedings. She ate from the bowl Leliana handed her, but said nothing. Out of the corner of his other eye, Zevran saw the templar fidgeting. Finally Alistair drew a deep breath and approached the Warden, his hands clenching and unclenching nervously.

"I want you to know, I'm sorry," Alistair said, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. "We're here for you. _I'm_ here for you. I know it must sting, to be betrayed like that. To show her mercy, it was far better than she deserved but I'm sure... you—you did the right thing."

This was too much. Zevran tossed his wooden bowl aside and leapt to his feet.

"No. She did not."

The Warden blinked in surprise, and Alistair looked irritated at the interruption.

"You should have killed the witch," Zevran declared, jabbing an angry finger at the darkness beyond the campfire. "While she is out there, she will always be a threat."

"No—" She shook her head in denial, but he would not let her speak it. He felt his own blood rushing, his nerves singing, with the pent up anxiety of knowing how close they had come to losing her, and the sudden understanding of what he must do to keep it from happening again.

How odd. He had sworn himself to her service because he had not wanted to die. Yet now it came to this. He should have known, from the moment he learned her name, that this moment would come. This was to be his penance.

"_Yes_!" Zevran insisted, mercilessly. "If you are to be a leader, you must begin to _think_ like one. You have seen the weaknesses in your security. In Antiva, we know of these things. Now is the time for a purge in your regime. Anyone whose loyalties can be questioned must go. And you must start with me."

He heard Leliana gasp in shock and realized that the bard was the first to comprehend what he was about. But his attention was on the Warden as she stared at him.

"No, Zevran," she said after a moment. "I need your services. I will not send you away."

He moved closer, until he nearly trod upon her toes. He shouldered Alistair aside despite the difference in their sizes. "I am not speaking of sending me away, Warden. You must kill me."

"_What?_" Alistair's voice was sharp with shock, and Zevran heard a distant murmur that he knew was the combined protests of Wynne and Leliana, but he had no attention to spare for them. All his focus was on the Warden.

"I will do no such thing!" she declared, outraged. "Your loyalties are not in question."

"They should be. I am an assassin, hired to kill you. You have no way of knowing if I can be trusted not to turn on you. If the witch, who has traveled with you from the start, cannot be trusted, how much less so can I?"

"_No!_" The Warden shot to her feet, practically pushing him away from her as she made a space in which she could retreat. "You gave me your oath."

"Oh?" Zevran deliberately dropped his voice down to a purr, slinking closer to her, putting into the movement every ounce of the innate sensuality that kept her welcoming him into her tent night after night. "Do not be a fool, _Warden._ You know, as I do, that I could slit your throat tomorrow."

"I don't believe that," she answered, shaking her head. "You offered that oath of your own will. I never demanded it of you. I never expected it of you. You've kept to it, day after day, even though I've made it clear I would not hold you if you wished to go. Morrigan was different. She never offered me any oath She promised me nothing, least of all loyalty. Indeed, I can't even really fairly accuse her of deceiving me, for she never made any secret of the fact that her purposes for being here were entirely her own."

"Do you think that oath means anything to me?" he sneered cruelly. "Come, Warden! Do what you know you must!"

The rest of the party stood in a loose circle around them, all tense and waiting, and for a moment, Zevran thought she would snap back at him, lashing out in anger. She stared at him, her body tense and quivering, her weight balanced upon the balls of her feet as though ready to attack.

And then she simply... subsided. The tension left her, her shoulders dropping as she lifted her chin. But when she spoke—!

"Draw your dagger, Zevran." It was that same cold, hard, pitiless voice she had used with the witch. When he hesitated, she snapped, "Do as I command!"

He drew his dagger from the sheath over his shoulder, but before he could bring it down to his side, she seized him. Her fingernails bit into the skin at the base of his thumb as she pulled his dagger to her own throat, pressing the keen edge of the blade to the throbbing pulse there.

He could not look around him, for all his attention was riveted upon her, upon those unflinching azure eyes. Still, he felt the ripple of tension that arose even without seeing it, felt it with the bone-deep instinct of a survivor. He felt the instant when Wynne's hand tightened upon her staff, ready to cast. Felt the Sten seize the hilt of his sword. Felt Leliana slowly, carefully reaching for her bow where it was propped beside her.

Of them all, only Alistair did not reach for his weapon immediately. Well, Alistair, and Conall, Zevran amended, realizing that the fact that he was not on the ground with his throat torn out meant something. The mabari, too, watched from the edges of the firelight. But no warning growl broke the charged stillness.

Eventually, though, even the templar's composure began to fray and his hand twitched closer to the hilt of his sword, leaving only Conall.

"Did you happen to see the shield we brought back from Ostagar, Zevran? The one which belonged to the king?" At his terse nod, she asked almost conversationally, "Have you ever wondered why the Theirin device, the device of the royal line of Ferelden since the days of King Calenhad, are two mabari rampant?"

When he did not answer, her lips curved into a soft smile. "Crude jokes about Fereldans and their dogs aside, it's because the mabari embodies everything Fereldans revere. Honesty. Bravery. Tenacity. And above all, _loyalty._ Those are the qualities which make us Fereldans."

It wasn't until that moment that Zevran understood she had been trained as an orator, among so many other things. Though her voice was soft, it carried, the cadence and flow of her words drawing them all in, swaying them. It was not merely charm which enabled her to have her way with people so consistently.

"If I cannot trust an oath freely given, then I have nothing left to fight for." There was a flash of tears in her eyes as she made the pronouncement, and she sank to her knees. The sight of her there, gleaming blade to her throat, made something in his chest tighten painfully. It was too similar, too familiar. Another pair of shining eyes, another woman kneeling at his feet.

A tremor took over her body, increasing until he attempted to draw his dagger away, fearful she would cut herself upon it with her shivering. But her grip was as tenacious as the teeth of the hounds of which she spoke, and she would not let him pull away. A shallow scratch appeared on her throat, weeping a crimson droplet down her fair skin.

"Better you should kill me now, Zevran, if that be the case," she said at last. "Merciless slaughter and paranoia are the tools Loghain would use to divide my nation. I will not answer in kind."

They froze there, her fingers locked upon his wrist, his eyes ensnared by hers. For a moment, Zevran wondered if it might be better to do as she asked. Not because he had been hired to kill her, but because in that instant it seemed more merciful than allowing reality to crush her idealism and naïveté, slowly and agonizingly, as it inevitably must. He could end it, swiftly, painlessly, and thereafter find his own death at the hands of her companions. It would be kinder than the brutal disillusionment life no doubt had in store for her.

But the Warden's eyes were clear as she stared up at him, waiting for his decision, as around them their companions grew more and more restive. She did not appear to him as naïve or deluded.

His mind traveled back to that rented house in Denerim where she had surrendered herself to him, choosing to trust him. She'd had no illusions about who he was, or what he was capable of doing, but she'd made the choice nonetheless. And here she was making it again, the choice not simply to trust _him,_ but to trust at all.

With a curse, he threw the dagger away.

* * *

Alistair's heart ached as Zevran flung aside his dagger and kissed Rìona, a frantic, urgent embrace that spoke more of fear and relief than passion. That was it, then. He'd lost before he'd ever really had a chance to play the game. She loved the assassin. She must. How else could she place such faith in him?

It wasn't that Alistair believed she didn't care for him, too. Whatever it was between them, that strange and compelling thing that had sparked into being in the Harrowing Chamber of the Circle Tower and erupted in a blaze that night after they visited Goldanna's house, still smoldered. But she had made her choice. All his waiting and wondering what he should do had won him nothing. He needed to find a way to make his peace with that.

For the second time that night, their party trickled away from a confrontation as it ended anti-climatically. Zevran was not his usual nonchalant self as he murmured in Antivan, inspecting the cut on Rìona's neck; that kiss had spoken to the extent of his discomposure, for the two of them did not normally moon over each other or engage in such overt displays. Rìona dismissed his concerns in the Common tongue, and Alistair realized she had understood the Antivan Zevran had been speaking.

Of course. Her mother had lived in Antiva for years, surely she would have taught Rìona the language. They had so much in common, Rìona and Zevran. How could Alistair have ever believed it could all turn out otherwise?

He wanted to feel petulant about it, wanted to sulk and get jealous. But he couldn't. Not after Morrigan's betrayal. Not after the Temple.

_A poison of the soul, a passion's cruel counterpart; From love she grows, 'til love lies slain._

He would not be Maferath to her Andraste.

They all dispersed to their respective tents, and as they did so, Alistair became aware of the fact that Zevran was taking the first watch alongside Shale, who didn't need sleep.

"For what it's worth," the golem said to Zevran, "I think it had a very valid point. I knew the swamp witch had to die from the moment I realized that, amongst its other forms, it could turn into a bird. A bird! The things it threatened me with!" There was a moment of silence as Zevran failed to acknowledge Shale's rumbling discontent. "But then, it styles itself after a crow, does it not? Hideous creatures. Not nearly as bad as pigeons, of course, but I will still happily crush them all. Perhaps I should begin with it."

When Zevran refused to rise to the bait, Shale sighed and walked away, the golem's footsteps sounding like sliding boulders in the quiet.

He watched as Zevran laid more wood upon the fire and prodded it distractedly with a stick. There was an instant when the assassin's face was almost—_almost_—unguarded, revealing something deeply troubled beneath. But it was fleeting, and his expression was blank when he looked away from the fire to see Alistair standing there, watching him.

"Was there something you needed?" There was a note of disdain in the Antivan's voice, as though Alistair's presence was a bore and a bother.

Alistair had no ready answer. Why _was_ he standing there, watching Zevran poke at the fire? What could he possibly have to say to the assassin, anyway?

Congratulations? Well-wishes? Some acknowledgment of the fact that Alistair knew who had won this undeclared contest? Alistair was, after all, a gentleman, or at least he tried to be. Punctilious courtesy was the templar's friend, or so he'd been instructed at the monastery. The surest way of fending off advances designed to tempt him into forgetting his vows was to greet them with an immovable wall of politely obtuse disinterest. Rìona made him forget that, made it so he couldn't think straight, but the foundation was still there. He could make it work for him.

Yes. That would be the right thing to do. Find some way to bury his conflicted feelings and accept defeat graciously. He could practice his speech on Zevran, so that he had it down when it finally came time to talk to Rìona.

"I just wanted to say... I admire what you did tonight. I hope you make her happy." Maker, it hurt to say those words!

To his astonishment, the elf laughed. At first Alistair bristled, thinking he was gloating. But, no. It wasn't like that. The laughter was bitter, angry, almost a savage snarl.

"Ah, I cannot get enough of such youthful romanticism!" Zevran jeered. "Come now, surely you must have more. Some truly grand, tragic, self-sacrificing gesture to make, yes?"

Angered by the assassin's mockery, all Alistair's noble intentions fled. "Don't push me. You think I like admitting I never had a chance?"

Zevran shook his head with a disgusted sound. "Whatever sins I have committed in my life—and certainly there have been many—none can possibly be so grievous as to warrant a punishment of being forced to sit by and watch you and the Warden pine for one another."

"Sitting by? Is that what you've been—wait. Pine?"

The elf snorted again, not deigning to reply.

"So if that little display earlier wasn't about... the two of you... then what exactly was that?"

"That, my friend, was about _cojones._" The emphatic cupping gesture Zevran made before his groin was enough to render a translation unnecessary. "_La Guardiana,_ she has them, yes?"

Confused, Alistair replied, "I rather got the impression you thought otherwise."

Zevran shook his head, a strange smile on his face. "I thought she was soft. She is not a fighter. There is nothing intimidating or dangerous about her. But as it turns out, our Warden has more courage in her smallest finger than you and I possess in our entire bodies."

"Not saying you're wrong," ventured Alistair cautiously, "but what brought on this observation?"

"It is an easy thing, to distrust everyone. A cowardly thing," Zevran answered, and for once there was no humor in his voice. "It requires no discernment, no picking or choosing of who to trust. It might keep you alive, but it's no way to live. Our sweet Warden knows this. I thought she had closed her eyes to the possibility of betrayal, that she was foolish and naïve. And perhaps with Morrigan she was. But it was not softness which held her, trembling an instant from death, beneath my blade. It was strength. She has chosen the harder path, acknowledging the possibility of betrayal while refusing to let it dictate her course. She will not let herself be pinned into a purely defensive posture, like a turtle trapped in its own shell. She chooses to trust, not blindly, not unthinkingly, but with her eyes wide open, choosing again and again to take the risk despite the danger. It is a keen weapon, against which there is no defense. It makes betrayal somehow unthinkable. Like the sly stiletto that slides painlessly between the ribs and into the heart, before you ever know you are wounded, you are slain."

Hearing it put that way stunned Alistair. He'd written off Rìona's sleeping with Zevran as a stupid risk taken for the sake of wantonness, not the result of a conscious choice of trust over paranoia. But she had pulled Zevran's fangs by giving him her trust, hadn't she, compelling his loyalty before the assassin even realized it? Had that been her design all along? She'd spoken often of the value of engendering loyalty and goodwill, but Alistair had never paid attention.

How had he never seen her doing such a thing?

It had been easy for him to dismiss everything she did as being somehow less valid because of her sexual excesses, as though her habits in that regard tainted everything else, no matter how unrelated. As though she was defined only by the number of people she took into her bed.

Why had he reduced her to that in his mind?

Now, as he thought about it, he started to see how difficult it must have been to bind such a disparate group of people together. Wynne: a mage, feared and reviled throughout Thedas for her abilities. Leliana: a bard, trained spy and thief. Sten: who had murdered a family with his bare hands. Shale: who had killed his (her? its? Alistair never knew how to think of the golem) former master. And, of course, Zevran: the assassin hired to kill them.

On the surface, there wasn't a trustworthy person in the lot. Even Alistair himself, indoctrinated by the Chantry, had to have seemed a danger to Rìona with her particular philosophies. Especially knowing what he knew now about Morrigan's magic and the reason the Chantry had become so restrictive on matters of pleasure.

But she'd given them all her trust and, in return, they had given her their loyalty. They followed her willingly, coming together into a fighting force to be reckoned with, not because she demanded it and not because she was a skilled general, but because she simply made it impossible not to.

Zevran nodded slowly as he watched these thoughts chase across Alistair's face. "She would have made a frightfully good queen, yes? Your nobles, they would have followed her out of adoration. Long enough to save your country, at least."

Unhappily, Alistair agreed. And now she carried a royal heir, a bastard whose heritage she could not prove. The irony, as Rìona might have said, was staggering.

"You love her." His own blurted statement surprised Alistair, more so even than the nonchalant shrug Zevran gave in response.

"She would not welcome it, if I did."

"I don't see how that's possible," Alistair said stubbornly. And he didn't. What had passed between Rìona and Zevran, in those charged moments when she'd brought his dagger to her own throat, had been as intimate as lovemaking, in its way. "The two of you are together, night after night, day after day. How can you possibly be so close, so constantly, trust each other so deeply, and not call it love?"

Again, Zevran laughed, and it was a different laugh than his bitter humor from earlier. This was a laugh that ran up Alistair's spine like warm fingers as the elf slanted his suddenly predatory gaze upon Alistair. "You still cling to these childish ideas of romance. Shall I show you just how _easy_ it can be?"

The challenge in Zevran's eyes, and the low purr in his voice, held Alistair riveted, while the assassin unfolded himself and stood. He practically _prowled_ toward Alistair, and each silent, advancing step made something clench tighter in Alistair's gut, made warmth and pressure tighten in his breeches. He wanted to order Zevran to back away, but found himself unable to form the words. He was mesmerized, his breath suddenly coming short and fast, as Zevran drew uncomfortably close, invading his space.

"You love the Warden," the elf said as he stood before Alistair, so close that a single step forward would have pressed them to one another. "But who is it you are responding to now? Do you think you could not find pleasure at my hands, or release between my lips, if I offered them to you? That you would not yearn for it again the next day, even as your heart longs for her?"

Alistair had to close his eyes, had to shut out the sight of Zevran so near. He thought of those isolated times in the monastery when he had reacted to another man, and how he had always dismissed such reactions as a fluke. Maker! How had he never realized before...?

Licking his dry lips, he forced himself to speak, trying to focus on anything other than Zevran's nearness. "Why—" he hesitated, then drew a deep breath as he felt the elf move away. "If that's all it is, if that's what she needs, why can she not simply be with me, instead?"

"Because that is not _all_ she needs." There was a hint of censure in Zevran's eyes, as he folded his arms across his chest and stared at Alistair. "You do not have it within you to let her be what she needs to be, to do what she needs to do. She will never belong to any one man or woman. She will never lose the taste for more varied pleasures than one person can offer. She will never stop thinking of herself as a courtesan first, and approaching the world and its problems as one. She fears you would hate her for that. That you would hold her back, and try to make her wear a shroud of shame. "

"I would never—" Alistair began to protest but that strangely wise, scolding gaze stopped him. "Right. Thank you. For—telling me. All of this."

"_Sí_," Zevran said with a brief nod, and walked away to patrol the camp, apparently dismissing Alistair entirely. Weary and confused, Alistair sought the shelter of his tent and the lonely warmth of his bedroll.

_I would never hate her,_ he had started to say. What a load of bollocks. He'd spent half his time since they first went to Redcliffe all those months ago angry with her, and resentful at her for not being what he believed a "good" woman was supposed to be.

Maker knew he wanted her. But it was more than that. Something deep within him, deeper than mere physical desire, yearned for her. The thought of harm coming to her drove him nearly mad with the need to protect her. Her smiles thrilled him; her tears made him ache to comfort her. But he'd never actually attempted to understand her. Oh, he'd asked questions about what she did, but he'd never tried to understand what drove her. Not really.

Could he ever truly accept the woman she was, rather than the woman he would try to make her into? Or would he spend all his time angry and disapproving?

Half the time he wasn't even sure _why_ he disapproved. When she had prostituted herself—and he knew it was at least partly his fault that they had been so desperate for coin—he'd been furious and disgusted, especially once she admitted she had enjoyed it. Why was _that_ the sticking point? Why had her actions in the stables in Redcliffe, with Bella and that other man, troubled him more than what she had done atop the Circle Tower? Why did he keep trying to make what she did with Zevran about romance, rather than what they both insisted it was?

Why could he accept dire necessity or love, as an excuse, but not simple pleasure?

Was it possible she was right? Had he been told too many times how wicked and sinful wantonness was, to the point where it had become his truth even as he professed to doubt what he had been taught in the Chantry? Did they still have such a hold on him, despite his efforts to leave his days there behind him?

She took such risks, to bind them together. Trusting them all, making herself vulnerable, adapting rather than becoming more rigid. Why was she the only one taking those risks? Why was he standing in her way, when he should be helping her?

He lay there questioning himself for hours, until he heard Leliana relieve Zevran for the next watch shift.

In the ensuing silence, he listened harder, his body tightening expectantly. And then, at last, he heard it. A masculine murmur followed by a feminine sigh and a whimper of pleasure. So familiar by now, those sounds. He knew them as completely as he knew the Chant of Light or the Grey Warden oath. His eyes closed. His hands sought his body, sought the warm, surging flesh as it swelled.

For the first time the pleasure of his own touch, his grasp, was not marred by a discomfiting hint of shame. Oh, shame tried to creep in, but he forced it back, refused to give in to it.

For the first time, Alistair let his mind truly see her. Not as he wished her to be, lying beneath Alistair himself, sighing her pleasure for _him_, but as she actually was. In Zevran's arms, beneath Zevran's body. He saw them both, twined together. He let himself hear _Zevran's_ sounds, rather than overwriting them with his own soft groans. He let himself accept that it was Zevran bringing those impassioned sighs from Rìona's lips, giving her pleasure.

He grew harder. Maker, so hard! He chased eagerly after that ache, that need, rather than shying from it and trying to deny it. He embraced it and it crashed through him with a wave of heat and a rush of mind-rending pleasure. It erupted from him in a torrent of hot, thick fluid across his belly, accompanied by their chorus of moans and mewling cries. As the ringing in his ears faded, he let himself hear every one, and they were beautiful.

He wiped himself off with no hint of revulsion or embarrassment. He felt free, intoxicated; deliriously, joyfully liberated, as though something long held in check had finally been loosed.

All those weeks ago in Denerim, Rìona had told him to guard himself, take care of himself, to strive for what he knew he needed. And now he finally understood what that was and what he had to do to have it.

Starting tomorrow, things would be different.

* * *

The Warden was asleep when Zevran entered her tent. After the chill outside, it was warm in the waxed canvas shelter, the air slightly moist from her breath. She woke as he stripped off his armor, moving aside to make room for him under the woolen blankets and furs. Her open eyes followed his movements until, at last, he slid under the blankets. Though she shivered and grumbled, she shared her heat with him, pressing her bare body against his.

He would miss this.

When he had warmed sufficiently that he could touch her without giving rise to complaints, his hands began to wander her body as she hovered on the brink of sleep once more. She gave a soft mumble of interest, shifting her position to give him freer access to her flesh. Her lips sought his and, though she said nothing, it seemed she had picked up on his morose mood, for there was something in the kiss that went beyond an attempt to arouse. An offer of comfort, perhaps. Or a request for it. Maybe both.

With that kiss, he understood how he wanted this to be, this final time. Pleasure they had shared together in abundance, giving and receiving passion. They could be rough or gentle as it suited their mood, commanding or yielding in turns, perverse or demure. But they coupled. They fucked. They did not make love.

Once, just this once, they would.

Stroking her fine, high cheekbones with his fingertips before sliding them into her hair, he drank in that kiss. He demanded nothing, but requested everything, and she gave it. She nuzzled his neck, laying kisses along the line of his jaw and murmuring her approval as his hand cupped her breast. He pulled back the blankets and furs, rolling her onto her back and dipping his head to take a puckered nipple into his mouth. Then it was her turn to bury her hands in his hair, arching slightly, pressing up into him and encouraging more.

His hands committed her flesh to memory, from the points of her hips—made sharper by privation—to the ridges of her ribs. He did not explore that tiny swell at her belly, though. That was not for him; it implied things he would never be, and so he avoided it. He scraped his nails along her skin, then soothed away the pain with caresses. His teeth lightly scraped her nipple before he laved it with his tongue, and her arms came around his shoulders, holding him closer, rocking against him.

She gripped his thigh between her legs and thrust against it, coating his skin with her moisture. Drawn by that wetness, his fingers skated back down her ribs and along the dip of her waist. They delved down between the crisp curls and sought her slick heat, slipping within, bringing her hips up off the bedroll.

"_Sí, mi ciela. Encantadora,_" he muttered against her breast as her moans sharpened into cries, his fingers curling inside her as his thumb circled her pearl. "_Córrete, mi cortesana dulce. ¡Córrete para mi! (1)_"

She obeyed, seizing around his fingers, a strangled sob filling his ears as she bit her lip to stifle a scream. But he wasn't done, no, not even close. This night, this final night, he would make it last. Lips and tongue replaced fingers, soothing her through the aftershocks and then carrying her up and over the next peak.

And then he was over her, within her, feeling his own need for release mounting as she bit his shoulder and keened her pleasure deep in her throat. Her body was hot, flushed and sweaty, her skin sliding wetly against his as she met his thrusts. Then over him, rearing up, riding him, her thighs flexing as she rose and plunged down again. She was magnificent in her passion, and Zevran strained to hold back a little longer, before he was pulled under as well. But the fluttering clench of her sheath around him was irresistible; he surrendered with a low groan, surging up into her with a final, spine-arching pulse.

The logistics of cleaning up afterward and settling back under the blankets and furs were accomplished in thoughtful silence, until at last they were pressed together, sharing the heat of their bodies with passion sated.

"Starting tomorrow," Zevran murmured against her hair, "I will be sleeping in my own tent."

He felt the tension ratchet through the Warden's body as she drew a surprised breath. "I see," she said slowly, and nothing more.

Nothing more, because they had agreed from the very beginning that they would place no burdens upon one another, make no demands, have no expectations. And yet her silence itself was expectant, full of questions she would not ask out of respect for the boundaries she had insisted upon.

That much, he could give her, without placing upon her the burden of knowing how far beyond their boundaries he was in danger of trespassing.

"It is time, _querida_," he said simply. "Time for you to stand and carry your burdens without a crutch, yes? You do not need distraction as you once did."

"Perhaps not," she answered, her body relaxing by increments. "But I rather think I shall miss the pleasure for its own sake. And the company."

"As will I, _mi Guardiana dulce_. As will I."

Translation:  
(1) "Yes, my darling. Enchantress. Come, my sweet courtesan. Come for me!"

(Be sure to check out the link in my profile to the awesome artwork DragonReine has done for this and several other chapters!)


	34. Chapter Thirty Four: Changes

In just four months' time, the Korcari Wilds and lower Hinterlands had been astonishingly altered. The sky roiled with reddish-black clouds, making the light dim and giving it a sickly cast. As they had made their way south through the Hinterlands after leaving Redcliffe, the lush farmlands had been barren. It was not merely the faded yellow-brown hues of winter. Beneath the snow, the grasses and stalks in the fields were black and rotting, and the bark on the trunks of the unclad trees was turning soft and crumbly, brushing away at a mere touch to reveal the dying wood underneath.

Even the earth smelled wrong. When they dug their firepit and latrine to make camp in the evening, the soil did not smell of the natural, life-renewing decomposition of last year's greenery, but of something sharp and putrid that would burn any bud that attempted to spout before it ever had a chance to thrive.

There were empty farmhouses everywhere; not all of them had been burned to skeletons of charred beams by the darkspawn. Her company could have found lodging beneath a roof on any night of their travels but, by unspoken agreement, they camped in their tents instead, ignoring the abandoned and invariably haunted-feeling buildings.

Their supplies began to run low; there was neither fresh meat nor vegetation with which to supplement their rations. Eventually, they subsisted only on porridge cooked from the oats they had carried with them out of Redcliffe, and dried strips of salted pork, mutton and venison.

Even these were threatening to become depleted, and so Rìona decided they would travel east from the point where Morrigan had left their company, skirting south of the rocky Southron Hills, to take the Brecilian Passage north into the Brecilian Forest in search of the Dalish. It would be a more difficult journey, and colder in the higher elevations, but game would be more plentiful once they were out of the Blight-touched lands, and they were equipped well enough for cold weather, at least. If nothing else, her efforts had seen to that.

It felt strange, to be traveling without Morrigan. She had taught them much about surviving in the wild; they likely would never have made it beyond Lothering, had the witch not made such simple suggestions as saving the pelts of the wolves and Blight wolves they slew to insulate their bedding and boots. For all that they had each been flayed by her tongue time and again, she had been a valuable companion, and Rìona felt her absence keenly.

She felt she had somehow failed with Morrigan, though she didn't know how. She'd tried to reach the witch, tried to befriend her and found herself rebuffed at every turn. Surely there must have been a way to turn Morrigan into an ally, to convince her to give over her attempts at treachery. But Rìona didn't know what more she could have done. Whatever Morrigan's reasons were for wishing Rìona or her babe ill, no amount of kindness or goodwill seemed capable of turning her from her course.

Rìona spent a great deal of time keeping to herself, on that journey through dying lands to the Brecilian Forest. She was learning to be alone. It was not anything she had ever done before; there had always been someone there. At times she wondered who she was, when she was not in the sphere of another person, when she must rely upon herself without the promise of pleasure to distract her from her burdens.

Now, she often retired early to her solitary tent to consider the events and challenges of the day, and how she might use them to address or resolve the challenges that might lie ahead. She tried to find ways to not be overwhelmed by the seemingly impossible task that lay ahead of her, ways not to become mired down in the conviction that she was unqualified for the duty she must perform.

Since the day Alistair had shifted the burden of leadership to her, she had felt paralyzed by her own inadequacy. She was neither a general nor a soldier, to conduct a war. She was at best a diplomat's pampered daughter and at worst, a whore with the pretension to style herself a courtesan.

And yet, she was succeeding. She have saved Redcliffe, saved Conner Guerrin, and salvaged something out of the catastrophe that had befallen the Circle of Magi. She had equipped her ragtag band to survive the harsh Fereldan winter, put a minor dent in Loghain's mercenary forces and cadre of blood mages, and cured Arl Eamon. To her own surprise more than anyone else's, they had survived and triumphed thus far, and not all of that was due purely to the superior fighting expertise of her companions.

Against all odds, they had made it thus far, and it was she who had led them. Maybe it was time for her to stop considering herself purely in terms of what she could accomplish with her skills at pleasure. Perhaps even time to let go of some of that crippling sense that her obligations were too enormous for her to meet.

It was a long journey, and yet a peaceful one, too—well, as peaceful as could be expected, considering they had to contend regularly with bands of darkspawn as they made their way to the Brecilian Passage. Still, there was no archdemon to contend with, and the bulk of the horde seemed to be concentrated in the west, making their journey easier as they moved east. 

* * *

It was a time of change. Change in the world around them, change within her party, change within herself.

Alone in her tent one mid-Drakonis evening, she felt the first quickening of the babe within her womb.

It was strange; nothing like the unmistakable flutter deep inside that she had imagined. It felt like a muscle twitch in her abdomen; an involuntary vibration, much like what she often experienced in her arms the night after a long fight. It was gone, before she even realized what it was she had felt, leaving her unsure what she had even felt.

She lay there long into the night, waiting for it to recur, filled with wonder that it had happened at all. She was awestruck by the incontrovertible _reality_ of the babe within her; that vague, undefined being who had managed to survive thus far despite the incredible odds, and had laid claim on her heart in the process. The babe was growing and thriving. It was becoming a person, and it was doing so with no effort on her part whatsoever. The life within her was creating itself. It was a mystery, and now she understood why her mother had never been able to explain it beyond an inventory of the symptoms a woman might experience. There were simply no words to encompass that knowledge; to explain the way a babe altered a woman's worldview simply by being.

Of course, that the babe had survived to this point was the result of a joint effort. Wynne, Leliana, Zevran, and even Alistair, had all contributed in their way to making it possible. Despite her selfishness in insisting on carrying the babe, and the fact that her pregnancy was a liability for their company, they nonetheless strove to preserve it.

Rìona felt her loneliness keenly during those hours she waited for that small movement to come again. She wished she had someone to share it with, some soul in whom she could confide her sense of wonder and hope. But, though all her companions had invested themselves in some way or another in helping her carry this babe, she was still alone in it. Her parents were gone; her mother would never know the joy of expecting another grandchild, nor see Rìona begin to understand the mysteries of motherhood for herself.

Cailan was also gone; she had not cared for the man, but she now wished she had a father for her babe, someone to whom this new development would have the same sort of significance it did to herself. This was especially true in light of the documents they had discovered at Ostagar. Rìona wasn't certain what all the ramifications of _those_ would be.

She needed to discuss them with Alistair. She'd intended to do so once they were found, but there had been Morrigan's treachery to deal with, and the matter had fallen by the wayside. He'd been so angry with her when she hadn't protested Arl Eamon's plans for him. She had prodded him about determining his own future, rather than letting himself be used as a pawn. She couldn't do that and then keep this knowledge from him without making of herself a hypocrite.

Resigning herself to her utter failure to sleep, Rìona at last dressed and left her tent, relieving Sten of his watch shift.

Sitting outside in the frosty night, it was harder to remember that spring was coming. Among the numerous reasons she missed Zevran's presence in her tent, she thought with a small smile, was the fact that he had helped ward off the cold. One still couldn't tell from the amount of snow on the ground and the frigid temperature, but the days were lengthening, and there was a moistness about the air that suggested spring was now a matter of weeks, rather than months, away.

There was a sound of rolling boulders in the silence, and Rìona looked up.

"Having a pleasant night, Shale?"

"I _was._" The golem sounded disgruntled. "The qunari is a most gratifying companion with whom to keep watch. It does not chatter on needlessly."

"You enjoy the chatter," Rìona retorted with a smile. "How else would you find the opportunity to espouse your contempt of us fleshly creatures?"

"Well, I could always crush their skulls. I find that communicates contempt quite nicely."

"Ah, but then you'd be alone again with no one to talk to."

"Hm." The golem didn't sound exactly pleased by that prospect. "For that, I could simply have remained in Honnleath. Very well, I shall put up with its chattering for now. Though I must say, it has been decidedly less chatty, lately."

Rìona conceded the point with a shrug and turned her gaze back to the fire. Silence fell, and Rìona let her mind drift. Keeping watch with Shale was more a matter of courtesy than necessity. The golem did not require sleep, which meant everyone could have gotten a full night's rest, in theory. But it struck Rìona as rude to expect Shale to keep watch alone, and so they continued to rotate watch shifts as before, to keep the golem company.

Though, she supposed, she wasn't terribly good company tonight. Too many decisions yet to be made, too many questions outstanding. She worried how Alistair would react, when she told him what she had found among Cailan's correspondence at Ostagar.

Sometime later, Shale spoke again. "I notice it's acting differently these days in many ways."

"Why, Shale, are you making conversation?"

"Don't be insulting. I am merely observing that its behavior has altered."

"I suppose you're right," Rìona replied thoughtfully. "I've had a great deal to consider, lately. Forgive me if I'm not as companionable as I've been in the past. I mean no personal slight by it, I assure you. I simply need time alone, time to think."

"I am hardly offended. The quiet has been a relief." Shale paused, then ventured, "It no longer shares its tent with the painted elf, either. Is that the cause of its sudden need for introspection?"

"Observations, hm?" Rìona smirked. "To me, it sounds as though you're trying to gossip."

"Hmph. Gossip is for squishy creatures. Tell me, is it trying to provoke me into reducing it to a sludgy pulp?"

Rìona laughed gaily and Shale rumbled away with a long-suffering sigh.

"You know, I'm starting to think Shale's constant disdain, and threats of violence, should be interpreted as endearments."

She glanced over her shoulder as Alistair emerged from his tent. "If you're not careful, Shale will be tugging on your queue next... as a gesture of affection."

Alistair shuddered and grabbed his braid protectively. "I'd just as soon not have that happen. I'd rather my head remain on my shoulders, thank you very much. Nightmares?"

Rìona shook her head. "I just can't sleep. You?"

He nodded. "Is it just me, or are they getting more intense these days?"

"They are," she agreed as he sat beside her at the fire. "Perhaps it's our proximity to the Blight-touched lands?"

"Either than, or the archdemon's a lot more active these days, and I don't even want to think about what that's going to mean," Alistair said grimly.

Silence fell, and it was not the unhappy, resentful silence Rìona had become accustomed to from Alistair since they had left Denerim. Indeed, she wasn't the only one who was behaving differently these days; since Morrigan had left the party, Alistair had altered. She hadn't realized what an irritant for him Morrigan's presence had been. He was, in turns, both more lighthearted and graver, more apt to smile and also more apt to make helpful and insightful suggestions. It was Alistair who, looking at Rìona's tattered map, had first advanced the notion of taking the Brecilian Passage to hasten their return to uncorrupted lands.

It was a peace Rìona was reluctant to prod at, and yet there was the issue of Cailan's documents still outstanding.

"I've been wanting to speak with you," she said at last, wrestling her reluctance into submission, "about some of the correspondence we found in Cailan's chest at Ostagar."

"What about it?" Alistair asked carefully.

"Most of the contents, I was already aware of. I had seen the letter wherein Arl Eamon broached the subject of Cailan setting aside Anora and taking another queen in an effort to get an heir, and Cailan told me himself about the overtures Empress Celene had made toward him, hinting at an alliance with Orlais through marriage."

_"What?"_ Alistair shouted, then quickly lowered his voice. "Was he utterly _daft?_ Ferelden would never stand for such a thing!"

"Fool though he sometimes was, no, he was not quite that daft," Rìona said with a small smile. "I was given to understand he was aware that such a situation would never be allowed to stand, that the Landsmeet would overthrow him before they would permit it. That is at least part of why he wished to wed me. Doing so would have sent an unequivocal message to the empress that he would accede to no negotiation in which an alliance by marriage was the price of her aid against the Blight."

Alistair breathed a sigh of relief. "That's good, at least."

"There was one other document, however, that he had not shown me. Apparently he wrote it while we were in the Korcari Wilds with Daveth and Ser Jory. It bore the seal of the Chantry, which means he had the Revered Mother at Ostagar notarize it." Her voice drifted off as she thought of the implications of that document, not the least of which was that Cailan—for all his puppy-like enthusiasm—had not been quite as short-sighted as everyone had assumed.

"Well?" Alistair prompted. "What did it say?"

"It stated his intention to wed me," she answered simply, unhappily. "In it, he declared his plan to annul his marriage to Anora and affirmed his verbal contract with me. He also made provision for the chance that he should fall in battle against the darkspawn, and I turn out to be carrying his child. My babe was to be considered his heir."

Alistair blew out his breath in a sudden, shocked rush. "I... wouldn't have expected him to be capable of thinking so far ahead."

His response so closely mirrored her own that Rìona couldn't help but laugh softly. "I knew when he sent me to the Tower of Ishal that he was protecting me, trying to buy himself some assurance, and when I learned that you were his half-brother, his choice of sending you as well fell into place. He hadn't time to make it official, but it's clear he kept you out of the battle as his heir-designate. We were his guarantee. He had no way of knowing whether or not I had conceived his child, so he saved us both."

"So then, what does this mean?" he asked cautiously.

"That is, at least partly, your choice, I suppose," Rìona replied. "The document doesn't prove Cailan is the father of my child. Anora and her adherents could easily argue that I'm trying to pass someone else's bastard off as Cailan's. But, it does make their case much weaker. Assuming I haven't managed to tatter my reputation irreparably with my licentious behavior, it's possible the Landsmeet could ratify the declaration as being Cailan's will, accept the babe as his heir and appoint a regency."

Alistair frowned. "I thought you said they wouldn't do that, not when there was an of-age heir available."

"They still might not; the document only makes it more likely that they _could._ Especially if Arl Eamon were to back the plan rather than putting you forward as the heir-designate."

"So... I could be off the hook, then, in terms of being forced to become king," he said thoughtfully. Rìona nodded with a reluctant hum. "Why don't you seem happy about this?"

Unconsciously, Rìona's hand drifted to her belly, covering it protectively. She only realized she had done it when she saw Alistair's eyes follow the motion.

"I can't help but be pleased that it's possible my babe won't be labeled a bastard, of course," she said softly. "And it's only fair that he should be acknowledged, and granted his birthright. It's only..."

"What?"

"I don't want my child used as a pawn in the political machinations of others." Rìona bit nervously at her lip, trying to phrase her concerns in such a way as to make him understand. "There's a remote possibility I could be appointed the regent, or head of a regency council, but it's also possible that the Landsmeet may think I'm unfit, or too polarizing a figure after our struggles against Loghain. They may even put some stock in Howe's assertions that my family were traitors. In that event, the best-case scenario would be that I would be allowed to rear him but not rule on his behalf. I honestly wouldn't mind that, really. Particularly if I had, at least, a seat on a regency council to try to offset at least some of the worst tendencies to use him for political maneuvering. But the worst case scenario would be that he would be removed from my custody, and given into fosterage with the regent, or another noble of the appropriate rank. Maker forbid, they could even give him to Anora in adoption, as if he were her and Cailan's legitimate child."

Alistair's face fell. "They could... they could take him away from you?"

"It's possible. As king, my babe's person would actually be property of the state. But I can't say for certain," Rìona said with a frustrated shake of her head. "I honestly can't begin to guess what will happen if we prevail against Loghain and this matter goes before the Landsmeet. Or what might happen if we don't prevail against Loghain. There have been regencies for orphaned heirs in the past, yes, but not under such extraordinary circumstances. There's simply no way to know." Troubled, she looked away. "Truthfully, I'd rather he be labeled a bastard than taken from me."

"Why did you say this was partly my choice?" he asked.

"Because it wouldn't be fair to you if I used, or concealed, the letter without first discussing with you the ramifications."

"If you conceal it, then things remain the way they are now," Alistair said slowly, working it through. "I'll still be the heir Arl Eamon puts forward at the Landsmeet to contest Anora's claim to the throne."

"Yes."

"And if you use it, I might end up being king anyway, or any number of these other scenarios you've described could come to pass."

"Yes."

"So... you want me to decide what to do with the letter?"

Rìona hesitated, then sighed. "No. It's tempting, I admit. It was also tempting to just destroy the letter. I've done nothing but fret over the various possibilities since I found the thing. I'd love to be rid of it and leave the matter in someone else's hands. But no. I think we should decide together what our best course of action is. But given your adamant opposition to being king, I certainly believe you ought to have a say in the matter. I... may not care for the possibilities that lie ahead if my babe is declared Cailan's heir, but those possibilities are the result of the choice I made when I seduced Cailan and convinced him to wed me. I cannot shirk from the obligations that my choice entails, just because I've realized that I no longer desire the thing I once thought I most wanted."

"You don't want to be queen, then? Or regent?"

She shook her head. "Not the way I did then. It's ironic, really. Now that I see the good I could do, restoring Ferelden's tradition of being answerable to the common folk, I'm in no position to see it done. Back then, when I first set my mind on the goal of marrying Cailan, I saw being queen in terms of my own glory. Perhaps I even saw it as a means of redeeming my mother's shame for having been a whore. I justified it to myself, and my parents, as being a sound political move, a chance to get Cailan out from under Loghain's influence. But it was a young girl's silly vanity that drove me, and I'm not the child I was then."

Alistair bowed his head and fell silent for a moment before he asked, "May I read the letter for myself? Perhaps keep it for a while and mull it over?"

"Of course." Rìona retrieved the letter, with its dual seals stamped in wax; the Theirin device of two mabari rampant, and the Chantry sunburst. Alistair stared at it warily when she placed it in his hands, as though afraid it might suddenly bite him. He ran his hands over the rolled parchment gingerly, giving a nervous sigh.

"I'll read it in the morning," he murmured at last, tucking it inside his doublet. Again, Rìona was struck by her love for him. As tempting as it was for her to burn the letter and forget it ever existed, so must he be tempted to insist they use it so that he might avoid the fate of being king. But he hadn't done so.

For the first time in months, Rìona had hope that things had not been irreparably damaged between them. They could still work together to see the Blight's end. Impossible though their feelings for one another might be, they could still be partners in this matter. Perhaps even friends.

Rìona yawned, suddenly tired now that she was relieved of the burden the letter had been upon her soul. Smiling, Alistair bade her get some rest, and she complied, rising and crossing to her tent again. She took one last look at Alistair, as he sat there before the fire, and realized he seemed older than he had when they first met at Ostagar, only four months ago. She wasn't the only one who had matured, since then.

Perhaps it was true, what Wynne had said. They were all a little bit younger then.

For some reason the thought didn't trouble her as it might have done once. Instead, she crawled shivering into her bedroll, and smiled.


	35. Chapter Thirty Five: Blossom

They had been in the Brecilian Forest for nearly a week when, one morning, Alistair heard a groan of dismay from Rìona's tent.

"Leliana!" Alistair heard her call as he set down the ladle with which he was stirring their morning porridge under Leliana's baleful eye.

The bard made no secret of her dislike for the thick oat porridge most of their party favored for breakfast. She spoke longingly of breakfasts featuring bowls of chocolate and buttery pastries alongside clotted cream, fresh fruits and succulent roasted meats. Loyalty to the cuisine of his homeland required Alistair to defend his bland and pasty boiled oats, to the point where a herd of ogres couldn't wrench from him the truth that the breakfast she described sounded absolutely delicious. Of course, these days, anything that wasn't porridge and stringy, half-starved rabbit or venison sounded delicious. If there was one negative aspect to Morrigan having left their company (and this was another truth to which he would never confess) it was that the quality of their cooking had decreased substantially.

Still, even that was pleasant, in its way. Leliana and Wynne's good-natured complaints made the substandard fare more palatable, and had become a morning ritual to which Alistair looked forward each day. He hadn't realized what a pall Morrigan's fractious presence had cast over the entire company until she had left and the entire atmosphere had lightened.

At Rìona's call, Leliana turned her jaundiced eye away from the pot of porridge and stood, crossing the clearing to Rìona's tent. Making a show of stirring the porridge, Alistair ducked his head and strained his ears to listen.

"What is it—oh!" Leliana's surprised gasp was followed by something that sounded suspiciously like a giggle. "Maker's breath! Well, it looks like something's in bloom, even if the spring flowers are a bit tardy. Where did _that_ come from?"

"I don't know!" he heard Rìona answer plaintively. "It just appeared overnight. My armor fit yesterday and now—"

There was a breathless, straining sound and Leliana gave a displeased harrumph.

"Well, that will never do. The buckles are fastened, yes, but it's so tight, you'll be chafed raw before the midday meal. Well, we must simply leave these open, until we can find you looser armor. Come now, it's not so bad!"

A suspicious sniffle followed her words, and he heard Leliana croon comfortingly.

"It's ridiculous!" Rìona protested, her voice breaking. "How can I possibly convey any sort of illusion of competence to the Dalish—assuming we ever manage to find them—with my armor flapping open?"

"Perhaps a belt?" Leliana proposed. "Though, I suppose, if first impressions are a concern, armor that is haphazardly held together with a belt is hardly any more awe-inspiring than armor hanging loose, now is it?"

"No, it's not." Rìona gave a watery chuckle and sighed. "Ah well. There's nothing to be done for it, I suppose. Just as well we've been subsisting on meager rations these few months past, isn't it? Otherwise I'd have had this problem weeks ago."

Leliana hummed an agreement and silence fell for a long moment. And then Rìona's voice, softly inquiring, "This is really happening, isn't it? I'm going to have a child, going to be a mother."

"Ah... your porridge is burning."

Alistair started, nearly dropping his ladle, as Zevran spoke at his shoulder, drowning out whatever Leliana's reply may have been. Blushing furiously at having been caught eavesdropping, he stirred the oats where they were beginning to stick to the pot, finally daring to look up at Zevran.

Contrary to the mockery he had expected to see, the assassin was regarding him with something akin to sympathy.

"This is where it begins, my friend." Zevran's voice was soft and cryptic, and he turned and walked silently away before Alistair could ask what he meant.

"Perhaps when we find the Dalish, they might have an armorer capable of adjusting one of the chainmail shirts we took from that last band of bandits we fought?" Leliana suggested, lifting the flap of Rìona's tent and stepping out. Rìona followed, and Alistair was unable to prevent his eyes from seeking out the problem that had distressed her so.

The embossed leather down the front of her cuirass was unaffected, but at the waist, the fine chain mesh—normally secured with small buckles down her sides—gaped open slightly, the buckles flapping uselessly on their thin leather straps. Alistair had to tear his gaze away from the narrow strip of her linen undershirt revealed by the gap, but his attention was drawn inexorably back to it, over and over; the way it widened when she moved or bent. What he was hoping to see, he couldn't say, but that small patch compelled his attention far beyond what was reasonable.

He forced himself to look at Rìona's face, and her eyes were downcast, her entire demeanor miserably self-conscious. She kept tugging at the chain mesh as though she would force the halves of it to meet and close. Meanwhile, Alistair kept praying they wouldn't.

_This is really happening, isn't it?_

Her words, so full of fear and longing, returned to him. He was surprised at the sense of revelation contained in them, as though she hadn't considered herself in such terms before.

He had.

The first time had been after they had slain the high dragon atop the mountain towering over the village of Haven. During the long night they had all kept vigil, waiting to see if she would lose her babe before they could find a way to help her, the thought that kept returning to him, over and over, was that the babe she carried was his niece or nephew. Beside his termagant of a half-sister, the child would be Alistair's one blood relation in all of Thedas, and she would be its mother. However angry he was or confused he may have been by his feelings for Rìona, that fact remained. She was more than his comrade, more than even his sister within the Grey Wardens. She was his family.

It had been that thought which drove Alistair to propose that Leliana steal Morrigan's last lyrium potion. He'd done it to save his niece or nephew, yes. But he'd done it for her, primarily. He'd done it to spare a mother the tragedy of losing her child—likely the only one she would ever have.

She pulled on her cloak and those narrow gaps at her waist were covered. Leliana murmured some assurance about how they were no longer visible and wouldn't affect the impression she gave at all. Rìona didn't look comforted by that knowledge, and Alistair's eyes focused on her cloak. Its tattered and threadbare state had only gotten worse since they bought it second-hand from a bereaved family in the refugee encampment outside Denerim. Only diligent mending kept it functioning as a cloak at all. But for some reason, she'd never fretted over the impression she conveyed wearing it.

This wasn't about her appearance, Alistair realized with a startling surge of insight. It was about the way she perceived herself.

Surely she wasn't mad enough to think she was no longer beautiful? Or that she would no longer be desirable? Yes, that sounded more like the sort of fear she would have. Rìona defined herself by her sexual allure, tending to disregard her other assets in the process. The implications of motherhood would weigh heavily on her in that regard.

_This is where it begins,_ Zevran had said. Alistair wasn't entirely certain what that meant, except for a vague certainty that the assassin expected him to do... something.

Alistair was still trying to figure out what that something was when they set about breaking camp as the sun rose. The cookpot was washed in a nearby stream and packed away, the latrine filled in with dirt, and the embers of the campfire doused in water, frozen by Wynne and then buried. Shale—amidst a great deal of grumbling about how pathetic it was to watch them struggling under the weight of their packs—had volunteered to carry the tents and heavier gear. This left each of them responsible only for their own armor, weapons, bedrolls and personal effects.

Since that arrangement had been reached, they made several more miles a day than they had previously done, which seemed to please Rìona. Somewhere along the way, she had stopped talking freely about the potential obstacles they faced. Perhaps she felt it wasn't appropriate for a leader to express such misgivings, or maybe she feared for morale, but she tended to keep her concerns to herself these days. Despite that, Alistair knew the improbability of locating an encampment of Dalish elves—whom many people believed to be nearly mythical—weighed heavily on her mind. The longer it took them to find the Dalish, the longer the Blight would continue unchecked. They needed to be on their way to Orzammar the moment it appeared the mountain passes were beginning to thaw.

How did she stand it, the crushing weight of responsibility?

He hadn't understood, when he'd foisted onto her the responsibility for leading them, just what it was he was expecting her to do. Not really. He hadn't known what it would entail, or what she would sacrifice to accomplish it. It was fortunate, he supposed, that she was trained to lead, to rule. Better still that she was self-possessed enough to cope with such a burden. Anyone else might have broken under the weight of it.

No. Laying it all upon her had definitely not been his finest moment.

The quieter and more isolated Rìona became, shouldering her responsibilities alone, the worse Alistair felt about having insisted she bear them. He felt even more wretched when he realized Zevran was no longer sharing her tent. That seemed strange; he should have been overjoyed, seeing the path cleared for him. Instead, it just struck Alistair as tragic that she no longer had the comfort and support of Zevran, who had demonstrated—repeatedly—that he would do anything in his power to aid her.

When they stopped for the midday meal, Alistair found himself again struggling to get a glimpse of whatever lay under that gap in her armor, when Rìona took off her cloak. He couldn't begin to understand why the idea that she was beginning to swell with child fascinated him so, but he needed to _see_ it. He didn't realize he'd been staring until he felt Rìona's eyes upon him and lifted his gaze to meet hers. Her expression was tight and unhappy, and she quickly pulled her cloak on again.

If he'd stopped to think about what he did next, he probably would never have done it. He would have been too paralyzed by uncertainty. But instead, all he could think about was how he must do _something_ to ease her unhappiness. He dug through his pack for the item he sought—grimacing over its tattered state—and approached Rìona where she sat apart from their company, staring morosely into her empty dish. Conall lay by her feet on his belly, and she rubbed his broad head absently.

Alistair drew a deep breath and took the plunge, sitting beside her and extending the item in his hand. "Here. I wanted to show you this."

"A rose?" Rìona asked, startled.

"I picked it when we passed through Lothering on our way back to Ostagar," he explained. "There it was, in the middle of that abandoned, burnt-out village, in the middle of _winter_, with everything around it turning black and corrupted. And it was just blossoming there, as though daring the Blight to try to destroy it. It's... somewhat worse for wear, of course, having spent all this time in my pack, but I didn't want to leave it there. So I thought perhaps I might give it to you."

Terror was not the look he was expecting to receive in return for his gesture, but her eyes were wide and fearful. "Please don't," she whispered.

"I just... I never thanked you for all you've done. In fact, most of the time, I've been a real arse toward you. And you deserve better than that. You've brought us so far, and risked so much..."

The explanation didn't seem to be helping. She was still looking at him as though he was threatening her with a dagger rather than offering her a rose.

"I mean... here I've been complaining about all I've lost, and objecting to the way you've handled things, and... I was wrong. I was wrong to drop all this responsibility on you and then I was wrong again to give you a hard time about the way you handled it. And so I thought maybe I should... _tell_ you... what a rare and wonderful thing you are amidst all this... darkness."

She hung her head, drawing a shaky breath. "Oh, Maker, Alistair."

It was official; he was an idiot, Alistair thought, noting her distress. Whatever he'd thought to accomplish by giving her the rose, it wasn't happening the way he'd imagined it would.

"I'm... guessing by your less-than-enthusiastic response that it was a fairly stupid gesture," he said. "I'm sorry if I upset you. I just wanted to tell you—"

"No. No, Alistair. Just... _no._ It's very sweet, and I appreciate the sentiment. After all that's happened these past few months... it's gratifying to know you don't find my company completely repugnant."

"But?"

"But..." Her eyes darted around the clearing as she shrugged helplessly. "Sooner or later I'm going to do something else you find repulsive. Perhaps it's best if you don't... think too highly of me. That way no one is h... disappointed."

What had she been about to say? Hurt? Heartbroken? Whose heart, anyway, hers or his? What was that supposed to mean? Andraste's mercy, it wasn't supposed to be this complicated. She was supposed to smile and accept the rose with stars in her eyes, and then perhaps use her considerable experience to usher him past the awkward, embarrassing stage—maybe even straight into her tent.

Instead, she was still staring at the rose as if afraid that it was going to turn into a snake and bite her.

Whatever he had hoped to accomplish, this wasn't it. And he was tempted to retreat and take refuge in humor, except that he was _tired_ of retreating, of brushing matters aside with jokes and pretending that what did matter, didn't.

"Why would I be disappointed?" he asked instead, suddenly. He was no less surprised than she by the resolution in his own voice.

The look she gave him was so raw and fearful, it made him ache. Had he done this? Had he made her afraid?

"You don't approve of me, Alistair." There was something hopeless and tired in her voice. "And that's... fine. It is. I've never expected you or anyone to share my philosophies. But it's like I told you back in Denerim. You can't accept me. Even if I could commit myself to you, and you alone, from here on out—and honestly, not knowing what the future holds, I can't be certain I could keep to such a commitment if I made it—the shadow of the things I've done in the past will ever lie between us. I seduced your brother. I prostituted myself to a dozen men in a single afternoon. Sooner or later, those thoughts will begin gnawing at you, and you will resent me for all that I've done. Alistair. You don't want me."

Agitated, Alistair stood and paced away from her a bit, then whirled to face her. "You know, for someone who once told me I need to start deciding things for myself, you spend an awful lot of time telling me what I do and don't want."

Her eyes flew to his, astonished.

"That's not what I—"

"Isn't it?"

She dropped her gaze. "Maybe you're right," Rìona conceded. "But I have to take care of myself, just as you do. If I allow myself to... depend on your approval... then it will be all the more difficult for me when you decide you disapprove again."

Why did it feel like they were speaking in code? Why was she couching things in terms of his approval rather than her own feelings? Had he been misreading the situation all along, ever since that day in the Harrowing chamber? Did she not actually feel for him what he felt for her?

But if she didn't, then why was she so afraid?

The Alistair he had been, the Chantry boy, the one who had reacted so horribly in those first couple months after Ostagar, he would have retreated. He would have sulked and licked his wounds and given up the entire thing. But he wasn't that boy anymore. He had to make her see him as the man he was trying to be.

"You say that as though you're so certain of my disapproval," he said calmly. "Like it's a foregone conclusion. And maybe once it would have been, back when all this was so shocking and unexpected, and I was still so confused by everything. But I've spent a lot of time these past months trying to make sense of it all, and I know my own mind. And I know I haven't been all that supportive, but when I say I want to tell you you're wonderful, I mean it."

She looked so vulnerable and unsure sitting there. No, this wasn't at all the way he had planned for this to go. All he had wanted to do was bring a smile to her face.

"What is it you're hoping for, Alistair?" she asked wearily.

"Well, I was just hoping to make you smile, but clearly that's not happening." He gave a self-deprecating shrug. To his delight, Rìona did respond with a small smile. "I've never conducted a courtship before, so I guess I was confused. Somewhere along the way, I was given to understand that women liked flowers."

"A courtship?"

"Well, as near as we can come to it," he replied lightly. "What, with the Blight looming over us and everything, I don't know that there's really time to do it up properly. But... yes." He nodded decisively. "A courtship."

Cautiously, she asked, "To what purpose?"

"I don't know." Alistair shrugged again, a quizzical smile tugging at his lips. "And you know what? I don't really care. Maybe it's not about having a purpose. Maybe it just sounds like... a pleasant thing to do, paying court to a beautiful woman."

Her expression was bemused, her eyes wondering. "A courtship."

"You act as though you've never heard of the concept before."

"I'm not really sure I have. At least, not in the sense you mean."

"All the better then!" he announced triumphantly. "I've never courted a woman before, and you've never been courted. Therefore, I won't completely humiliate myself if I botch it too badly. And—" he dropped his voice low, squatting down before her. "Maybe I can set myself apart in the process."

He was taking a risk with that last bit, Alistair knew. Taken the wrong way, it could sound like a condemnation, or a refusal to acknowledge the men and women she'd been with before. But he didn't know how to put it any better than that. He'd once said the reason he'd refused her when she offered herself to him was because he didn't want to be just one of a number. That, he realized, was still true. He wanted to be different. Special. He wanted to know he could give her something no one had ever given her before.

Would she remember that conversation, and understand his intent?

"I—" Rìona looked down at her hands and only then did Alistair realize he'd taken them when he crouched before her. Such a simple thing, taking her hands, and yet the realization that he'd done it was a shock. It was more intimate than he'd planned on being just yet. But it felt right.

After a moment, she stopped staring at their clasped hands and cleared her throat. "I had thought I would use this time to learn how to be alone."

His heart sank a little at that, but he refused to let himself give up so easily. "Well, if that's what you need, if that's what's best for you, I'll understand," he said, trying not to sound too reluctant. "I will say, though... there's a lot of uncertainty ahead of us. I don't say that to pressure you. I just... We've still got a Blight to defeat, an archdemon to confront. Not to mention dealing with Loghain, and Howe, and Maker knows what else. I'm not sure how much time we have, and if the worst should happen, I'd rather be certain I had made the most of it."

Waiting silently as she mulled over his words was the hardest thing he'd ever done. He wanted to fill the breach with words; loud, nonsensical words that would render him somehow less vulnerable and exposed than he felt. But he made himself do it. He made himself squat there, holding her hands, until his knees ached with the effort.

Finally, she drew a long, deep breath. "A courtship." She spoke the word as though testing it, poking the concept for weaknesses. "I think that sounds lovely."

Alistair beamed, joy flooding him. Such a ridiculously insignificant victory to have won, and yet, he would rather have her permission to court her than an entire darkspawn army vanquished at his feet. He took the rose and laid it in her hand, closing her fingers gently around it, mindful of the thorns.

"A token of my esteem, my lady," he said softly, and she nodded, smiling tremulously. He was almost certain she didn't even realize it when she brought it close to inhale the last vestiges of scent carried by the wilted flower, its petals stroking her face.

"Thank you, kind ser. I shall treasure it."

He left her then, before he could somehow make a muddle of things. Oh, there was still so much more to be decided between them, he knew. Whether or not he would be welcomed to make more aggressive advances—the sort that would end with him in her tent—was the least of his worries. There was the babe she carried, and the politics that seemed determined to lay claim to him whether he wanted them to, or not. He couldn't begin to conceptualize where this courtship would end. But for now, it was enough that it had begun.

It was enough that, when he left her, she was smiling and her eyes were no longer troubled.

He felt a gaze upon him, and turned to see Zevran standing at the edge of the clearing. The assassin's face was neutral, but there was something in his eyes that Alistair thought looked surprisingly close to approval. Zevran gave him a slow nod and walked away.

Why that nod meant nearly as much to him as Rìona's acquiescence to his proposed courtship was a question he would have to deal with another day.


	36. Chapter Thirty Six: Equipoise

"You are very brave to adventure into such a place even knowing the danger that awaits! Your courage impresses us greatly!"

Rìona blinked at the Dalish storyteller, taken aback by his sarcasm and barely-concealed hostility. She could feel her people behind her, tense and ready to respond aggressively in her defense. Like a map before her, she saw the possibilities which could branch out from her response to this insult. She saw her people fighting the Dalish, being evicted from their camp as the Dalish refused to honor their treaty with the Grey Wardens. She saw the Dalish dying of their curse, put out of their misery before they could become beasts like the werewolves who had ambushed them. She saw the Blight overwhelming the lush Brecilian Forest and pressing north, ever north, covering Ferelden mile by mile.

Being within the Dalish camp felt like walking atop a tall mound of loose gravel. One wrong step could send her sliding to the ground below in severe pain, she thought grimly. She ought to give this storyteller, Sarel, her most disarming smile and find some way to charm him out of his hostility.

Instead, she turned on her heel and walked away, shaken and feeling ridiculously hurt over the matter.

All around her, there were distrustful glances, or perhaps worse, deliberately blank looks; looks that told her she was _other_, foreign and unwelcome. The distrust she could understand and even sympathize with; she knew enough of history to know how abominably humans had treated the elves. Sarel's hostility was both just and unjust, and it left her unable to respond. She could not defend her race; how could she possibly make a convincing argument in defense of herself?

"Why do you let these elves speak to you that way?" Sten demanded once they were back within the camp they had pitched the day before at the outskirts of the Dalish encampment.

"Was that unusual? Gracious, I had no idea! After over four months in your company, I'm rather used to being told on a regular basis how inferior I am." Her tone was light, but Rìona couldn't help the bitterness that seeped into her words, and she despised herself for it. Sten didn't deserve to be the target of her frustrations.

"I'm sorry," she sighed as Sten continued to stare at her with that odd combination of annoyance and impassivity only he seemed capable of achieving. "My people have treated the elves badly. They're entitled to their bitterness."

"So you would take on the guilt of all your kind?" Sten made a derisive sound. "An interesting burden to choose to bear, for one who struggles under the weight of her own pack."

He walked away before she could form a response, and Rìona was left feeling she was handling matters in entirely the wrong way, without any clear idea of how better to approach them. She'd promised their aid to Zathrian, but beyond that there was little else she could do.

It made Rìona wonder if she was nearly as skilled a diplomat as she had prided herself on being, once pleasure was no longer an avenue of approach. She could not heal an ailing halla with pleasure, or seduce away a werewolf curse, or erase centuries of conflict with a smile.

"The Sten has a point, _Guardiana._" Rìona started when Zevran spoke at her shoulder; she'd never gotten used to his silent approaches, and she suspected he enjoyed his cat-like ability to slink up on people. She was surprised that he approached her at all; since he'd stopped sleeping in her tent, he'd placed a great deal of distance between the two of them. Which, she imagined, was no doubt for the best, if he wanted to make a clean break of things.

She looked at him and realized not all of her reaction was startlement. Yes. It was definitely better that he was keeping his distance. She couldn't even begin imagine how complicated Alistair's courtship of her would be, if she was continuously tried by an ongoing desire for Zevran. "How so?"

"How will you make these Dalish respect you if you act as though you owe them a debt of guilt?" Zevran tutted at her, shaking his head. "You must make them see you as different from the rest of your kind."

"And how shall I do that?" Rìona challenged wryly. "Do you think they'll be impressed that I treated my servants well, or that Highever's alienage was frequently lauded as the best in Ferelden? Or perhaps I should tell them that I spent my last evening in Highever seducing Lady Landra's elven lady-in-waiting?"

Zevran didn't appear fazed by her irony. "Why should they be allowed to see you the same as the—_shemlen_ is their charming word for it—they have known before? Do you see them as the same as the elves you have known before?"

"I certainly try not to. I've never seen _you_ in such a manner."

He gave her a slightly chiding look. "Are you so certain? Do not take this the wrong way, _dulcita_, for it is not a complaint. My time in your tent, it was pleasant and I have no regrets, yes? But would you have been quite so quick to declare from the outset that it was pleasure and nothing more—_complicated,_ as you put it—if I had been taller, and with rounder ears?"

Astonished, Rìona recoiled. "I beg your pardon! Maker, how can you...?" Hurt by the accusation, she couldn't even formulate a coherent protest. After a moment of floundering, she finally sighed and said, "That was never a consideration, Zevran. Not ever. If I ever led you to believe such a thing, I'm sorry. You of all people know what a state I was in at that time. I would not have considered such an entanglement with anyone."

"Oh?" Zevran's amused eyes slid to Alistair, who was halfway across the Dalish encampment... Maker, what was he doing, speaking to Sarel? Neither of them appeared irate or confrontational. Instead, Alistair appeared to simply be... listening.

Distracted by the sight, Rìona had to force her attention back to Zevran. "Yes, and _him_ least of all. Even now, I dread what might come of this courtship he's so set upon. But then? It would have been unthinkable. If I seemed quick to dismiss the possibility of anything more with you, it was due to any number of factors, but none of them were that you were an elf."

That much, she realized, was true. Iona she had seen as an elf first and foremost, but she'd shared her tent with Zevran for months without ever thinking of him in terms of his elven heritage. He had always merely been Zevran to her, and the only significance posed by his pointed ears had been that of a delightfully sensitive erogenous zone to explore.

"Perhaps my cynicism does you an injustice, and if so, I apologize." Zevran accepted her denial with no argument. "If my being an elf was not a consideration for you, then you are one of a very, very few for whom it would not be. But it brings us back to my original point, does it not? You do not look at me and see an elf, so clearly you are capable of making such a distinction, yes? However, _they_ look at me with disdain and see a flat-ear, though I have little more in common with those who live in the alienages than they do. And they look at you and see a _shem._"

"I'm not sure it's so much that I'm capable of making the distinction as it was that you always presented yourself differently; neither elf nor human, but simply you. I always saw you in terms of pleasure given and received, not in terms of race or politics. You made it easy to see you as a man, no more and no less."

With a dip of his head, Zevran acknowledged the point. "It is true, I place little stock in my elven blood. But if, as you say, it was I who dictated the manner in which you saw me, can you not do the same with these Dalish?"

Apparently content to have had his say, Zevran walked away, leaving Rìona alone and thoughtful. She was tempted to call him back, to ask if the mistaken assumption he had made had any part to play in his decision to begin sleeping alone. For all her rather extensive preoccupation with Alistair and his proposed courtship, she found she was haunted by a sense of something left unsaid between her and Zevran. She had agreed—even insisted—from the outset that she would make no demands upon him. She had to respect his decision enough not to question it, yet that nagging sense that the matter lacked finality would not dissipate.

Perhaps the problem was simply that she missed him. She missed Zevran's presence beside her. Since he'd stopped sleeping in her tent, he'd become more aloof and guarded. She missed him not merely for the pleasure he provided, but for the sense of safety and support she had felt with him. She could never tell him that, for the same reason she could never ask why he had ended their affair. He would not welcome such an attachment, and that didn't even address the complicating factor of her feelings for Alistair, which continued to grow apace with the persistence of his courtship.

Speaking of whom...

As Rìona attempted to make her way back to the large campfire in the middle of the Dalish camp and rescue Alistair from Sarel's sarcasm, she found her arm seized by Leliana.

"Come with me!" the bard commanded, tugging Rìona insistently toward the craftsman the Keeper's second, Lanaya, had pointed her toward earlier when Rìona had inquired about purchasing supplies.

The craftsman, Varathorn, began taking her measure the moment Leliana deposited Rìona before him. "Hmm, yes," he murmured thoughtfully. "She's larger than our own women, but not by much. I may be able to alter some of the armor our females wear to fit her. And in exchange, you will seek out some ironbark for me when you venture into the forest?"

"We will," Leliana agreed, beaming.

"What is this, Leliana?" Rìona let herself be escorted into the aravel behind the armorsmith to remove her armor so he could get a better idea of her size.

"Have you not noticed the armor the Dalish women are wearing?"

Rìona laughed softly. "Only insomuch as to wonder how they manage not to freeze. Wait, are you thinking—?"

Leliana giggled. "It would certainly solve the problem of not being able to fit into your armor, no?"

"But it's so... bare!" Aghast, Rìona stared at her. "It will offer no protection against the cold, not to mention leaving my vital organs—and my babe—vulnerable if I should be attacked."

Leliana shrugged. "It will not be winter for much longer. Already the nights are not so cold, and your cloak will do until warmer weather arrives. Come summertime when you are heavy with child, you will be grateful for lighter armor to wear. And you have been doing well with the lessons Zevran and I have taught you, fighting from concealment and evading attack. We often go entire battles without you drawing the attention of our foes; you've not taken so much as a scrape since Haven. What you need is not protective covering, it's something that will allow you to grow with your babe without having to worry about replacing your armor or clothing again."

"Our females do not find themselves any more vulnerable wearing the armor when they are with child than when they are not," Varathorn observed. "They are trained to evade blows, or stay to the rear, behind those who wear heavier armor."

"I have the highest respect for your female warriors and scouts, Master Varathorn, but they do not fight darkspawn on a regular basis."

"They may very well do so, soon enough," he replied, shrugging. "Particularly if you have your way and we come to your aid against the Blight. And this is the armor in which they will fight if we do."

Realizing she was being ungracious when the two of them were only trying to help, Rìona bowed her head and acquiesced.

Varathorn gave a nod of satisfaction. "I have a set of armor nearly complete. It was meant for one of our females who died when the werewolves ambushed us. When you return from the forest, it will be ready."

"Thank you, Master Varathorn." Rìona smiled and exerted herself to be more diplomatic despite her misgivings. Maker, what would the dwarves, or the human nobility, think when they saw her? She'd look like a savage to them, with her great belly hanging out! But that was a consideration she would have to deal with at another time. "I would be deeply honored to wear armor meant for one of your fallen clanswomen."

She managed to make it out of the aravel and Leliana's exuberant company without giving anyone offense. Honestly, what was _wrong_ with her these days? she wondered in annoyance. Lately, she possessed all the congeniality of a bereskarn.

Alistair was no longer sitting by the storyteller, Sarel. Instead, he was speaking earnestly to a young Dalish man, his posture authoritative and the tone of his voice—carried on the breeze over the bustle of the elves going about their evening—stern. When she approached, Alistair bade the young man farewell and rose, following her to the outskirts of the encampment.

"What was that about?" She knew her voice failed to strike the casual, unconcerned note she was aiming for.

"Oh, man stuff." Alistair gave a small chortle, then relented when Rìona narrowed her eyes at him. "All right. The young fellow was moping because the girl he wants to marry won't give him the time of day until he completes his apprenticeship, which he can't do because of this pesky werewolf problem the Dalish are having."

Almost afraid to inquire further, Rìona blinked very slowly. "And?"

He offered her a smile that managed to be smug and self-deprecating at the same time. "And—being the voice of vast experience in all matters pertaining to moping, of course—I told him that he wasn't going to get his girl by sulking about it."

"That's it?"

"Well, I also told him we'd take care of the werewolves and he'd be able to complete his apprenticeship eventually, so his time would be better spent courting her than feeling sorry for himself."

"How could you know to promise him that?" Rìona demanded. "You were setting up our camp when I agreed to give our aid to Zathrian."

Alistair shrugged in a way that said everything and nothing. It was, oddly enough, the sort of enigmatic gesture she would have expected from Zevran, rather than Alistair.

"What else were we going to do? Anything to build our army, right? We need the Dalish."

"Yes, but you don't even know what we need to do."

"Does it matter? We'll do whatever has to be done."

Perplexed by his demeanor, Rìona asked, "Just like that?"

"That's usually the way you handle things. And I'm trying to learn some of that, you know."

"It's true," Leliana added, catching up to the two of them and falling into step behind them. "He spent all afternoon asking the Dalish storyteller, Sarel, for information about their history with the werewolves to try to get some insight into how we could help the Dalish."

Alistair blushed under Rìona's astonished stare and ducked his head. "What?"

"Sarel... spoke to you?"

"Well, it wasn't easy at first. He's not a bad fellow, really. He just lost his wife to the werewolf curse."

"How did you get him to speak with you, though?"

Alistair glanced away, looking a bit uncomfortable. "I just... did what I used to do as a boy in the monastery, when one of the other initiates was harassing me. Stared at them as though I didn't understand they were being insulting, until someone else stepped in and told him to stop being a prat. Which, by the way, one of the other Dalish did. Not everyone is unwilling to give us a chance."

She was staring again, until Alistair squirmed uncomfortably. "Did I do something wrong?"

"No. Nothing." Rìona shook her head quickly, dismissing a host of tactless inquiries. "I, ah... Thank you, Alistair. I appreciate the assistance."

Before she could unwittingly say anything to make him feel he'd erred in trying to contribute to their endeavors, Rìona walked quickly away, ducking into her tent to remove her armor. She emerged in a ragged, mended linen shirt and breeches, carrying her armor and a flask of oil to clean and condition the leathers and prevent rust on the fine chain mesh. She spied Alistair standing outside his own tent, as Zevran helped him with the buckles on his heavy plate cuirass and greaves, and once again she blinked in wonder. Alistair had barely given Zevran a friendly word since Rìona had begun sleeping with him; when had they become so companionable with one another?

"Has everyone gone mad today?" she murmured. Alistair thanked Zevran for his assistance and disappeared inside his own tent to finish removing his armor.

"You've been distracted a lot lately," answered Leliana.

Rìona grimaced to realize she'd been overheard. She turned to look at the bard, who was smiling softly as she stirred the stew. "Is that your way of telling me I've not been paying attention?"

Leliana shook her head. "No one faults you for being preoccupied after all that has happened. Morrigan's betrayal took us all by surprise, even though I think we all suspected all along that she was up to something. And then the situation with Zevran and Alistair and your babe..." Her voice trailed off and she gave a bewildered shrug. "Well, anyway. I think mainly we've all just wanted to leave you in peace."

Unable to respond to that, Rìona sat and began cleaning her armor, oiling the leather to keep it supple. Moments later Alistair emerged, bearing his own armor and sat beside her, companionably helping himself to her flask of oil as he began to polish his silverite plate and the leather straps that held the buckles which kept it secure.

"You know, I wasn't just trying to help you," he remarked after a moment. "I mean, I was, and that was certainly a large part of what I was trying to do. But I had other reasons as well."

Silently, Rìona waited for him to continue, reaching for a stiff-haired brush to loosen some dried darkspawn blood that had gotten between the links of her light chain mesh.

"The thing is..." Alistair hesitated a moment, seeming to grasp for words. "As much as I don't care for the idea of being king, and as much as I'm really hoping to find an alternative that won't drop it all on your babe, I suppose I need to accept that there's a chance it's going to happen, whether I want it or not. So I guess I'd better start... learning. I need to learn how to be a diplomat, and how to deal with others who want you to take on all their troubles for them, and how not to be a complete clod who's liable to stick his foot in his mouth at any given moment. I _need_ to be able to do what you do."

Rìona's eyes began to burn and she swallowed hard, stunned into speechlessness at his rushed admission.

"Maker, Alistair." Her voice was subdued when she finally spoke, still struggling to grasp all the implications of what he'd just told her. "I hadn't the vaguest idea you were thinking in such terms."

"You're the one who told me to start looking out for myself." He seemed embarrassed by what he had said, and yet there was something resolute in his expression as he met her eyes. "You even implied Arl Eamon might try to run Ferelden through me. I don't know if I agree with that; he is a good man. But I'm done with letting others decide my fate for me."

Once again Rìona waited in silent astonishment for him to continue. When had Alistair become this man to whom she was speaking?

"All my life, my decisions have been made for me." He snorted derisively. "Go to the monastery, become a templar... Maker's breath, I even had to be conscripted to become a Grey Warden. I never questioned it when Arl Eamon told me it was better not to get involved, better to just obey. But I can't do that anymore. I've got more choices now than I've ever had before. Am I just going to wait and let someone else whittle them down again until any chance I ever had for happiness is gone?"

Unable to respond for fear of being overwhelmed, Rìona looked back down at her armor, rubbing the oil upon it to give herself some other occupation while she tried to make sense of this suddenly altered dynamic between the two of them. Was that what Alistair's determination to court her was all about? If so, perhaps she could begin to let go of her fear that sooner or later he would begin to despise her. Perhaps he truly was capable of embracing her and all that implied.

She was reminded of Wynne's words, after they had left Denerim all those weeks ago. Wynne had predicted this, had seen it taking place long before Rìona had.

"I don't..." Alistair hesitated, swallowing hard as Rìona looked up at him, waiting for him to continue. He voice grew hoarser, more strained. "I don't want to just follow along, anymore. I want to stand beside you... _lead_ beside you. I want to do what I should have done from the start, if you'll give me that chance."

Somehow she didn't think he was referring only to their burdens as Grey Wardens.

Why did that terrify her so?

Perhaps because the last time she seemed to have the exact thing she'd always thought she wanted, it had actually turned out to be the very _last_ thing she wanted.

"I'd like that," Rìona whispered tremulously.

Perhaps Alistair was right in what he had said the night he offered her the rose. Perhaps they simply didn't have time to be afraid of the future, or time to even be certain the circumstances of the present were exactly right. Perhaps all they could do was live, while they had the chance.

"Oh! I almost forgot." Alistair's earnest, seeking expression dissolved into a smile of pure, boyish delight. "I got you something."

Digging into his belt purse, Alistair retrieved an brooch, wrought in heavy silver with a blue gemstone in the center. The workmanship was clearly Dalish, and it was lovely and elegant. Rìona glanced at him in surprise.

"It's beautiful, Alistair, but how did you afford this?"

He dropped his gaze. "I, um, traded one of our unused weapons for it."

"Unused? But there's only the weapons we found at Ostagar." Rìona's voice trailed off in shock. "Alistair. Did you trade Duncan's dagger for this?"

When he looked up again, his face was calm, but determined. "I did. No one was using it. Zevran's blades are a matched, balanced set, and Leliana's—which she rarely uses anyway—are already engraved with runes. I don't think Duncan would begrudge me using it to get you a courtship present."

Alistair set aside his armor and, taking the brooch from her, knelt and reached for the rusted clasp of her tattered cloak. Rìona lifted her chin and closed her eyes, shivering as his knuckles lightly brushed the skin of her neck while he pinned it in place.

"There. Beautiful." Alistair's voice was a deep, satisfied sigh as his fingertips came to rest on the fluttering pulse at the side of her neck. She didn't know if it was deliberate, the way the flat of his thumb stroked along the line of her jaw, but the effect was profound. "The, uh, cloak doesn't do it justice, really."

Rìona tried and failed a number of times to make her voice work, particularly when his thumb brushed her lower lip. Her head slowly tilted to the side to afford him greater access to her neck as his fingers dipped just inside the collar of her shirt to caress the sensitive tendon at the juncture of her shoulder.

She couldn't breathe, couldn't think with him so very close. It would take an instant, no more, to lean forward and kiss him, to give some outlet to this longing welling up within her.

Maker's breath, was she actually being _seduced_ by a Chantry-reared virgin?

Rìona opened eyes she hadn't even realized had drifted shut to see him watching her intently, his hazel-gold eyes dark and filled with desire. That delicious current of awareness sizzled between them, at once maddening and wonderful.

Slowly, his lips curved into a smile. "It was _absolutely_ worth it," he murmured—and moved away from her, leaving her breathless and stunned as he gathered his armor and disappeared into his tent.

It took a long moment to remember how to breathe. When she finally looked around again, everyone else in the camp was studiously ignoring her. Wynne's head was bowed over her mending. Sten polished his sword outside his tent. Leliana stirred the stew as though her life depended on preventing it from burning. No one looked at her, except, far across the way by the edge of the trees, Zevran. His eyes were shuttered, his expression inscrutable as he watched her. But then he gave her the smallest hint of a smile, and a very slight bow, and disappeared into the trees.


	37. Chapter Thirty Seven: Shade

Zevran awoke slowly, groggily.

That was his first indication something was wrong; he _never_ awoke slowly. He'd been a child when he'd learned to spring instantly to awareness at the first sound, the first movement, the first hint of light or the presence of another.

Something was desperately, dreadfully wrong.

The next thing he became aware of was voices. Alistair, Shale and Wynne. And yes, there was the Sten as well, giving a low, rumbling groan and demanding to know what had happened.

He opened his eyes as the cool breeze of rejuvenating energy brushed over him, and quickly he waved his hand, shooing Wynne off even though his thoughts were too jumbled for speech. _Go,_ the gesture said. _Save your power for those who need it more._

"Wynne?" Alistair's voice, tense and anxious. "She's not waking."

"What?" His voice was sharp with concern, even as Zevran himself rolled quickly to his feet, suddenly alert. He knew of only one woman who could bring that particular note of concern to the Alistair's voice.

"What happened?" He heard Leliana inquire muzzily somewhere behind him. Zevran might have wondered the same himself, except that his attention was riveted upon the still form lying on the ground, her skin ashen and her lips nearly blue.

_"¡Sangre de Andraste!"_ He didn't remember moving, but the next thing he knew, he was on his knees beside her, opposite Alistair. Conall gave a concerned whine and made room for him, snuffling at Rìona's temple. As Wynne shuffled wearily back toward them, clearly exhausted, Zevran felt frantically at her throat for the shallow fluttering of her pulse.

And then Wynne was there, laying a hand upon his Warden's chest.

"She lives, but she's very weak. I feel the child as well, and it's the stronger presence right now. Whatever affected us when the shade sapped our energies appears to have spared it."

"I have seen this sort of thing before." Zevran leaned close to Rìona and felt her slow breath upon his ear. "Certain poisons, or suffocation... but I see no evidence of such a thing."

"None of the rest of you looked like this, when you were out." Zevran tried not to notice the way Alistair's hand shook as he stroked Rìona's hair back from her face while he spoke. "Or maybe you did," he corrected himself. "I didn't really have time to notice. We were investigating the campsite, and then suddenly the rest of you were on the ground and it was just me and Wynne and Shale."

Alistair drew back, and Zevran felt a pulse of—something—flow from the templar, dispelling any lingering dark magic. A moment later, another wave of Wynne's rejuvenating energy washed over them all. Then the Circle mage moaned softly and Leliana caught her as she began to sink to the ground.

"I'm all right," Wynne said weakly, her voice a bit peevish. "The battle with the shade was taxing, though. The spirit inside me helped prevent me from falling to its spell, and now the spirit is weary. But we can't linger here, in this... deathtrap."

For the first time since waking, Zevran looked around, taking notice of his surroundings. The campsite, which had seemed so inviting when they had begun to investigate it, was a ruin of skeletal tent-frames and the bare, bleached bones of hapless travelers, who had stumbled upon what had clearly been a cleverly constructed illusion.

"Right." Alistair looked down and rubbed briefly at the rune-marked ring he wore on his right hand, as he often did when he was deep in thought. Drawing a deep breath, he took charge.

"Sten, Shale, take our packs." His tone was firm; if he had any misgivings about being in command, they didn't show. "Not just Rìona's and Wynne's, but mine and Zevran's, too. If they're too unwieldy, Sten, give one to Leliana. Er... Zev, Rìona's a little smaller and lighter than Wynne. You'll carry her, I'll carry Wynne. I don't anticipate we can go that way for long, but let's try to get at least a half-mile to a mile between ourselves and this place; then we'll make camp for the day."

"Perhaps I should carry one of the females," Sten offered unexpectedly. "I will no doubt be able to bear the weight easier than an elf."

Alistair appeared to think about it for a moment, then shook his head. "Thank you, Sten, but I want you taking the lead with Conall. If we get attacked by werewolves, I'm counting on your sword to give us enough time to set Rìona and Wynne down without actually just... dropping them. If we do get attacked, we set them down and form a circle around them, keep them safe. Understood?"

Zevran found himself wishing his Warden was awake to see it, the moment her beloved took control of matters. It was as though the templar was suddenly an entirely different man than the one Zevran had first come to know in those early days after his failed attempt to kill them. She would be proud. Strangely, Zevran himself felt much the same. It was a relief, to see Alistair making himself into someone worthy to stand beside her.

Sitting so near him, Zevran saw—if no one else did—the moment of hesitation Alistair had as he gave them each their assignments. He hadn't wanted to assign Zevran to carry Rìona. He'd wanted to be possessive, and keep her to himself. But he set such petty considerations aside, and instead made the rational, sensible choice. He behaved as a commander, rather than a besotted boy.

Yes. Their Warden would be very proud, indeed. 

* * *

They went much further than a mile. A short time after they set out, Wynne declared herself able to walk, and thus Zevran and Alistair were able to trade off carrying Rìona. It was nearly two hours before Wynne began to stagger again, and Alistair commanded they make camp for the night.

Leliana immediately spread a bedroll out on the ground and Alistair laid his precious burden upon it. He then instructed Sten and Shale to begin erecting tents, and told Leliana to prepare the campfire and begin working on supper. Zevran tensed as Alistair's eyes fell upon him, certain Alistair would assign him a task as well, but instead he said nothing as Zevran knelt at Rìona's side.

Wynne had to shoo Conall away to make room for herself, for he had laid down and pressed himself against Rìona's still form. The color was back in her lips, but her skin was still alarmingly pallid. Wynne sent a pulse of energy into her and nodded, sighing in relief.

"She's stronger. I don't think she's in any danger; she's just taking much longer to recover than the rest of us."

"Why?" Alistair beat Zevran to the question.

"I can't say for certain." Wynne frowned down at Rìona in puzzlement. "If I had to guess, I would say it had something to do with her babe. The shade was sapping all our life energies. Perhaps, because of the presence of the child, the shade sensed _more_ life energy from the Warden and thus drew more from her. Or—and I can't imagine how this would be possible—perhaps the shade tried to sap the babe as well, and somehow Rìona substituted her own energy to protect her child."

"So what do we do for her now?" Again, it was Alistair who asked, and Zevran let him, even though he wondered the same thing himself. It wasn't his place to ask.

The mage gave a slightly helpless shrug. "I'd say keep her warm and let her rest. It's late afternoon, anyway. It's possible she'll sleep through the night. After I've had a few hours to regain my strength, if she doesn't seem to be recovering quickly enough, I'll cast another rejuvenation spell to help matters along. If she doesn't rouse by morning, we'll reassess the matter."

They were all exhausted from their ordeal—even Sten looked drained—and so Alistair asked Shale if she would object to keeping watch alone for the night. The golem decided to forego her normal insults about the frailties of fleshy creatures and graciously acquiesced. Wynne retired to her tent before the sun had even set fully.

Aware that he had done nothing to aid in their endeavors to prepare camp for the evening, Zevran forced himself to abandon his vigil at the Warden's side to take charge of cleaning and organizing camp after supper, so that Leliana and the Sten could go to their rest. It was another indication of his exhaustion that the Sten requested help with the harder-to-reach ties and buckles of his armor. Unlike the rest of them, for whom it had become part of the daily routine to request and render that sorts of assistance, normally the qunari declined such services when they were offered and struggled through it alone.

It was another sign of how narrow their escape had been that no one sat beside the fire to clean and oil their weapons and armor, as was usually their habit in the evening. It was fortunate, Zevran supposed, that they'd fought nothing which bled today, in their hunt for the werewolves' lair.

When Zevran returned from washing the cookpot in a nearby stream and gathering another armful of firewood, he found Alistair unbuckling Rìona's armor, struggling to get her limp body out of the leather and chainmail encasement.

"I'm trying to decide if she'll be warmer in her tent, or here by the fire," he explained as Zevran fed logs to the fire.

"Beside the fire." He gave the templar an even look. "Particularly if she has someone laying beside her, keeping her warm on the side opposite the fire, yes?"

"That's... a good thought. Thank you."

Without permission, Zevran ducked into Alistair's tent and emerged with his bedroll and an armful of the furs they had used to keep warm throughout the long winter months. He noted with amusement that the scent of musk was heavy upon them. So that was how the templar spent his cold and lonely nights. Wisely, however, he said nothing. Instead, Zevran knelt beside Rìona and began helping Alistair with her buckles. He waited for the templar to protest, but apparently Alistair had decided the imperative of the moment was simply to do whatever it took to keep their Warden warm and comfortable.

They did not speak, as they worked together to remove her armor and bundle her in furs and blankets. Alistair nodded his thanks and spread out his bedroll beside her, then began pulling at the ties which secured his pauldrons in the front. Zevran wordlessly stepped behind him and unfastened the ties laced to his arming doublet in back.

The silence was becoming strained, and so Zevran exerted himself to fill it. "It occurs to me we really ought to see about acquiring a squire for you at some point in our endeavors. This armor you wear is most inconvenient, _mi amigo_."

The templar chuckled. "I can just see it. Rìona manages to recruit a volunteer to follow us around carrying my pack and help me with my armor, and then it's all, 'mind the darkspawn blood, lad' and 'try to keep out of the way of the bandit arrows.' Don't get me wrong, I'd be thrilled, but somehow I doubt the position would be filled for long. One way or the other."

"You may have a point," Zevran acknowledged as he began to unbuckle the rerebraces, couters and vambraces. Theoretically Alistair could remove these arm coverings himself, but it was difficult work to do it one-handed, and frankly—in Zevran's opinion—ridiculous to watch him try.

"We had squires at the monastery, of a sort." Once the opening to make conversation was offered, apparently Alistair wasn't inclined to let it go to waste. "The junior initiates always helped the senior initiates, which frankly the senior initiates used as an opportunity to make their lives even more miserable. Because, of course, being stuck in that place wasn't misery enough."

"That is common in many places, yes?" Zevran shrugged. "We had such habits among the Crows, also. I think, in such conditions of unwilling service and entrapment, many see the only way to cope with the misery is to pass it around."

"I suppose you're right." Alistair shook his head. "I guess we have at least one thing in common, after all."

"I would not go that far." Zevran's mouth twisted in a wry smile as he stepped around the templar to remove the armor from his other arm. "Unless your older initiates frequently made the younger initiates draw lots to see who would be that week's, ah, entertainment. Some weeks, the entertainment died."

"Maker!" Zevran focused on a buckle whose strap was fraying, making it difficult to loosen, and did not look up. He had no interest in sympathy, or in hearing outraged protestations. To his surprise, though, Alistair offered none.

"I'm so used to feeling sorry for myself about being sent to the monastery that I guess I don't stop to think how much worse it might have been," he said after a moment.

"It could have been far worse for me, as well." Zevran kept his tone light. "Shall I tell you what happened to the brothel boys who were not bought by the Crows? If we are looking for common ground, my friend, I do not think it will be found in our pasts, yes?"

Simultaneously, they looked in the direction of their sleeping Warden.

"Right." Alistair seemed to consider pursuing that thought for a moment. Then, instead, he returned to the more neutral topic. "So, armor. I wonder how Sten manages? Maybe it's some unique design of that armor of his. For that matter, I wonder how Duncan did it."

"The mentor you speak of sometimes?"

"Yes. He traveled a lot, and he didn't always take his squire with him, if he thought there was a chance he'd run into darkspawn."

Zevran stepped away when he'd loosened the last buckle, murmuring _de nada_ when the templar thanked him. He retreated to the fire, stirring it and adding more wood to be certain Rìona was kept warm enough. When Zevran glanced across the way, Alistair had finished removing his leg armor and cuirass. He settled on his bedroll and pressed gingerly against her, dragging a blanket across them both. He seemed at a loss as to what to do with his arm and finally settled on draping it cautiously over her waist... as though he were afraid of being accused of taking liberties, Zevran thought, chuckling to himself.

Zevran had assumed their conversation to be over, once the intimacy of removing Rìona's armor and helping Alistair with his own was done. But as Zevran reached for his own buckles—much easier to manage than if he were wearing plate, yes, but still somewhat awkward at times—Alistair spoke again.

"Sorry. I should have offered to help you as well. Usually you go to Leliana for that, these days, so I didn't think... I'm a bit preoccupied tonight. Anyway, sorry."

For some reason the apology, the consideration, made Zevran uncomfortable, and he sought refuge in flirtation. "If you ever wish to get me out of my armor, _amigo_, you need only ask."

Predictably, the templar blushed and looked away, falling silent. Inexplicably, the silence was worse, as though now that the two of them had begun conversing, it was better to continue than to stop. Zevran hadn't anticipated that.

"Tell me more of this mentor of yours."

"Duncan?" Alistair looked startled. "Oh, well... Rìona says he was ruthless, that he used people. I guess I can't really argue that point; I've seen some of the things he'd done. But he was always kind to me. He was the first person to ever care about what I wanted. He saved me from from a situation I didn't know how to get myself out of. What about you?"

"What do you mean?"

"Any... mentors, companions, _friends_... from Antiva that you miss?"

"Yes." One word. Nothing more. Zevran though that would end Alistair's questioning.

It didn't.

"There was a woman, wasn't there?" he pressed. "In the temple, the Guardian of the Sacred Ashes mentioned a woman."

The templar was not the person he ever imagined this particular question coming from. He'd anticipated it for weeks, after the temple, but Rìona had never asked. He could see it in her eyes, that she wanted to. But he had refused to speak of his past to her once; she would not ask again.

He and Alistair had no such implicit understanding, and so the templar plunged into territory their Warden had carefully skirted.

Zevran should have resented the question, and refused to answer. He should have shut the templar up with a scathing reply, preferably one which tweaked his virginal sensibilities. He should have retreated to his tent and lay there thinking about it the rest of the night, rather than seating himself by the fire, watching Alistair hold their Warden, and confiding.

Staring into the flames, Zevran told him the tale of the elven woman who had died at his feet as he mocked her declarations of love and innocence. He told him of discovering how hollow and worthless his life in Antiva had become, and how he'd sought his own death by accepting the contract on the Grey Wardens, only to find salvation instead.

"Her name was Rinna." The templars eyes widened a little at that, and Zevran nodded once. "Yes. You begin to understand a little. When I learned the name of the Grey Warden, my mark, I _knew_ I was meant to find my death at her hand in atonement for what I had done, what I had allowed to be done, to a woman I..."

"Loved." It wasn't a question.

Zevran scoffed. "I am an assassin. Raised by whores and trained to know only murder. What do I know of such things?"

"More than you're willing to admit, I suspect."

He could not answer that. He felt exposed and vulnerable, as though he were standing in a crowded marketplace with no armor or weapons and a heavy purse at his belt. The templar's insights were not what Zevran would have expected from him, when they first met. Again, he was struck by the change.

For one trained to fight defensively, Alistair knew surprisingly well how to slide a blade in at the moment one was most disarmed.

The templar stroked their Warden's hair again, glancing at her as he asked, "Why did you step aside for me?"

Zevran looked away. He was not a jealous man, but it was too much, to see the tenderness in the way Alistair touched her and know that the templar was worthy of her, after all.

"Because it would not be fair, to step back and expect no one to fill the void."

They passed the night in silent vigil, waiting for her to awaken. Zevran knew he would not sleep until he had seen with his own eyes that she was well. It was a bittersweet thing, to see her eyes open and immediately fly to the templar, finding herself nestled in his arms, and made even more so by the expression in Alistair's eyes as he gazed at her in relief.

There was a strange symmetry to it, like the matched and balanced blades Zevran wielded in battle. The templar and his Warden, they were the light pair, contrasted to the dark companions of his prior days. Then, Zevran willingly sat by and watched another man slit the throat of the woman he loved. Now, he watched unwillingly, as the templar's hand came up to caress her face, and knew she would never come to harm by that hand.

He had done the right thing, stepping aside for Alistair. And yet he did not like this feeling, of being on the outside looking in. He wondered if Taliesen had felt that way, when Zevran and Rinna began falling in love and excluding him more and more. Had that been the source of his spite toward Rinna?

That, Zevran decided adamantly, would not repeat itself. He would leave them, before he allowed it to get to that point.

But for now, he would sit on the outside and watch, and hope it became easier.


	38. Chapter Thirty Eight: Falling

"I don't like this forest," Rìona announced to no one in particular. At her feet lay the quickly disintegrating remains of a shade.

"I told you not to meddle with that sarcophagus." Yes. Yes, he did. Alistair's self-satisfied tone made her waver with indecision as to whether or not she should snarl at him, or stick her tongue out peevishly.

It didn't help that he was right. The mystery of those ancient gravesites had become a fixation for her, compelling her to investigate, which had in turn caused a number of delays for their company. If one positive thing had come from it, it was that they had acquired a new set of armor in the process, in case Sten's or Alistair's should be damaged.

Disgusted, she kicked the root of a tree that had, over the ages, pushed its way through the stone wall of the ruins and begun to creep across the ancient tiled floor.

Her toe protested. The tree, thankfully, did not.

"You know, next time we get attacked by one of those angry trees, I'm gonna tell it you did that," Alistair drawled. He looked weary; it seemed as though they'd been in these ruins forever, seeking the werewolves. They'd run into a dragon, a vast number of undead, and now several shades, but no werewolves.

Irritated, she ordered their company to prepare to camp. It would be their second night—or so she assumed—in the underground ruins. They'd been forced to camp after the dragon, as well, to bind their wounds and clean their weapons and armor.

"I don't like this forest," she said again, flopping wearily down on the floor and leaning against the root she had kicked, as though it were now suddenly a best friend upon whom she could hang during a drunken evening in a tavern.

"Yes, I'm getting that impression." Alistair said calmly. "Any particular reason why?"

Rìona frowned. "Where should I begin? Talking trees? _Angry_ trees? Talking werewolves who are intelligent enough to set ambushes? Hypnotic campsites that try to kill us? And, of course, another distraction from our business of actually gathering our army to fight the Blight. Every day we linger here is one day we're _not_ moving toward Orzammar, and another day the Blight continues to spread unchecked while Loghain plays tinpot tyrant."

"All right, you have a point," Alistair conceded.

"We need to move on," she fretted, rolling her head against the crumbling masonry of the wall. "Alistair... I don't have many more months left to get this done."

Inevitably, his gaze dropped to her abdomen, where her armor hung half-open at the sides, giving her a slovenly appearance. She caught him looking at her often, these days, in just such a manner, and wondered what it was he was thinking. It must be strange for him, courting a woman who carried his own brother's child. She wondered if it posed an obstacle; perhaps he found it repellent. Perhaps it was the reason he insisted on this chaste courtship. Maybe he couldn't bring himself to press further in these circumstances.

Rìona had thought, after the morning she had awakened beside him following their encounter with the shade, that things were going to be different, that Alistair had decided to advance their courtship to something less... proper. But once he was assured that she was going to recover, he resumed his gentlemanly comportment and courtly overtures, or at least a rough approximation of such things in their travels. It had been all she could do to talk him out of insisting on carrying her pack, despite the fact that it would have been one more thing he would have to lay down in order to take up his sword and shield in the event of an attack.

Frankly, it was beginning to get a bit frustrating. She was accustomed to thinking in terms of passion and seduction, not chastity and restraint. Her bedroll felt emptier than ever, these days, and her mind returned over and over to the two soul-shaking kisses they had shared so many months ago. She wasn't certain she knew _how_ to be virtuous, not really, but she was determined to make an effort for his sake. If he wanted a courtship, she wasn't going to deny him the opportunity to conduct it.

That resolve wasn't making her lonely tent any less lonely, however. Nor was it doing any favors for her self-confidence, which had taken a number of blows since she'd learned of Morrigan's betrayal.

Alistair lifted his gaze and discovered her watching him. He looked quickly away, as though embarrassed to have been caught staring.

"We'll do what we have to do," he said absently, and went to oversee the distribution of their rations.

Discontented with his lack of concern, and his apparent unwillingness to discuss her child as anything more than a political abstract, Rìona laid out her bedroll and wandered out into the antechamber to the wing of the ruins wherein they had battled the spirit.

Her gaze chanced upon the pristine, spring-fed well from which she had drawn water earlier. Although the earthenware ewer that had sat beside it had shattered, after she used it, the water was still flowing, clean and clear. Seizing upon an idea, she hurried back to the chamber in which they were spreading out their bedrolls and sharing their rations. Since the cookpot was going unused, Rìona claimed it and filled it from the spring.

"Wynne, would you heat this for me?"

Moments later, she was seeking out the privacy of another small chamber off the corridor they had cleared of its undead inhabitants earlier. Like so many other rooms in the underground ruins, it had been partially reclaimed by the forest. The roots of great trees had broken through the stone walls, creating impassible barriers in places, and hidden nooks in others. It was in one of these Rìona settled with her pot of steaming water and a linen cloth. She shed herself of her armor, and was in the process of drawing her ragged shirt over her head when she heard a masculine throat clearing behind her.

"There you are." When she looked over her shoulder, Alistair was staring at the wall, refusing to glance at her. He'd removed his armor, which seemed to indicate things were well underway with regards to setting up camp for the night. "Um, Leliana said you came this way. I thought I'd check on you, in case some of our undead friends from earlier decided to reanimate. But... I can see you just wanted some privacy, so I'll, um... leave you to it."

"Alistair." Rìona forced herself to sound lighthearted and amused, when in truth she felt anything but. She didn't know how to cope with his reticence. If he was trying to make her into a vestal creature because he could not bring himself to accept her passions, this entire courtship was doomed. She would never be that sort of woman. "You're welcome to stay. It's not as though you've never seen me in a bath before."

"Yes, well... that was different." Rìona turned to find he had turned his back to her, offering her privacy without actually leaving. "I wasn't courting you then. It wouldn't be..."

"Proper?" Rìona laughed and finished discarding her shirt. Her breast bindings itched, damp with sweat, but she decided to leave them for the moment. "If you're waiting for me to be 'proper' you're going to be in for a sad disappointment."

"Is that what you think I'm doing?"

"Honestly, Alistair, I couldn't begin to say what you're doing." She heard the frustration beginning to color her tone and grappled for a more neutral approach, one that wouldn't seem to be an indictment of his gallantry. "I certainly have no objection to being courted, especially since it means so much to you. But if you're doing this so that you can pretend I'm some unsullied maiden, it's never going to work."

"Maker, no! It's not that!" Though he still didn't turn to face her, his hand slapped down on a fallen block of masonry by which he stood. "Rìona, I just... I wanted to let you know I see you as something more. More than just... a body. More than just pleasure. Maker's breath, you don't hear the way you talk about yourself sometimes; as though that's all you are. As though that's all that matters about you. I just wanted you to know I want all of you, not just... flesh."

Tears stung her eyes and her voice was unsteady as she asked, "Are you certain? Are you certain you're not trying to deny the part of me that _is_ rooted in flesh and pleasure?"

"Yes, I'm certain."

"Then why can't you bring yourself to look at me?"

He whipped his head around and when she met his eyes, Rìona began to understand just how very much her assumptions had erred.

His amber eyes were molten gold. Hot. Dangerous. Fierce. They spoke of _need_ and of primal things that knew absolutely nothing of courtly romance.

"Because if I look at you, I don't know if I'm going to be able to stop at just looking."

Just like that, she couldn't catch her breath. Her heart pounded, her pulse raced. Everything within her tightened, leaving her aching with arousal and desperate to be touched.

Andraste's mercy. How long had he been feeling this way? How long had he been holding himself in check? Since that frustrated embrace all those months ago in Denerim?

"Would that be so bad?" she somehow found the breath to ask.

With visible effort, he turned away again. "It would, if I want to carry my point."

"And precisely how long do you think it's going to take you to carry your point?"

"As long as it takes you to realize you've got more to offer than just pleasure."

That sent a stab of... something... through her. Something she didn't particularly want to investigate.

"I can't abandon what my parents taught me, Alistair. It's part of who I am. It's part of the legacy they imparted."

As she watched, he bowed his head for a moment, then his shoulders rose as he drew a deep breath. "I don't want to disparage your parents. I know you loved them, and that you were close to them. But did you ever think that _maybe_ they had some of the right ideas, but they applied them wrong, or carried them too far?"

Indignation welled up within Rìona in a furious rush, but before she could even put her argument into words, he said quickly, "Just hear me out, please! I've changed enough of my ways of thinking because of you, maybe you could just listen, just once?"

She folded her arms over her bound breasts, suddenly wishing she still had her shirt on. "All right," she said tightly. "I'm listening. Please, do tell me how everything my parents taught me was wrong."

"Oh, Maker's blood! That's not what I said at all!" Alistair snapped back, turning an irritated look on her. He met her eyes, apparently forgetting to stare elsewhere as he readied himself to argue.

"Then what are you saying?"

"I went to the monastery quite young. A lot of the other templar initiates—second sons and the like—didn't come until they were older, until they were nearly men. And I'd hear them talking about the girls or women they had... known, before they came to the monastery. Bragging. They talked about them as though they were _things_, rather than people. And I always felt badly for those women, for being regarded that way. And then, a while back, I realized I'd done some of the same thing to you. Once I cataloged you in my mind as a... loose woman, I guess... that became the only thing about you that mattered. Who you slept with, and whether you did it for a purpose or just because. It overshadowed everything else you were doing, everything you had already done. And I was... ashamed of myself, for thinking of you that way, but then I realized you also think of yourself that way."

Rìona stared at him, her anger and defensiveness forgotten. His thoughts so closely echoed her own musings, these last several weeks, that it left no room for anything other than astonishment.

"I confess, I've thought much the same things recently myself." She cleared her throat, her words coming with effort. "Perhaps at least part of why I've been so out of sorts lately is because I'm trying to learn to think of myself, and my approach to things, in a way I never have before. I've always wielded pleasure like a weapon, the only weapon I really knew how to use, and I can't continue to do that anymore. I'm going to be a mother soon, for Andraste's sake. When I realized how I was changing—physically, that is—" His ears reddened at the mention, and Rìona couldn't help but smile. "—my first concern was for my _appeal._ That it would prove an impediment, if I decided a seduction was the best way to get something done. And then I thought, surely that can't be right, that of all things, _that_ would be my greatest concern."

Alistair nodded. "I just... I sometimes wonder if maybe your parents didn't... deny you something, when they taught you to see yourself that way. As I said, I don't mean to treat their memories disrespectfully," he said quickly. "From the love you bear for them, I'm sure they were wonderful people. And I think some of what they taught you, some of the things I'm learning through you, are good things. I think you're right, perhaps, about desire and pleasure being the greatest of the Maker's gifts to us, and that the Chantry is wrong when they try to suppress that, or make us ashamed of it. But are the Maker's gifts meant to be weapons? Should we be using them cynically—like Morrigan did with her magic—rather than celebrating them?"

Rìona sighed, smiling sadly. "If that's what my parents did—and I don't necessarily concede that it is—that wasn't their intent. They thought they were liberating me from the repression of society and the Chantry. They thought they were teaching me to lay claim to a marvelous gift this world would strip from me, if it could. They had seen the way sex could be used to destroy. My mother saw it in the brothel, and my father in the war against the Orlesians. They didn't want me to become a victim of that. They wanted the balance of power to favor me in whatever I chose to do, and so they taught me to take something which might have been used as a weapon against me and wield it, in order to protect myself. They taught me to take a weapon and turn it into a tool, to use it to build, to form bonds and alliances and offset hostility, rather than destroy."

It ached, to speak of them. But, she realized with a touch of surprise, that ache was less keen than once it had been, and her instinctive protectiveness of their memories was not so blinding that she couldn't concede a possible fault in their logic.

"The truth is," Rìona confessed, "they were scarred by the experiences of their youth, by what happened during the Orlesian occupation. Much as Loghain himself clearly is, I imagine. My father used pleasure as a balm, which on the whole is not a bad thing, for it can certainly be used to heal. But he did so excessively, perhaps, as a sot might use strong spirits. It was less about pleasure and more about escaping his evil memories, I think. The only mercy was that he was discreet about it, or else our family reputation would be in tatters. And my mother was taught to regard pleasure as a commodity, rather than a gift. She was taught her value lay in her body. They struggled with that all their lives, to take those damaging events and use them as a foundation for building something positive. Perhaps you're right. Perhaps I took away from their teachings the wrong lessons. Or perhaps the bitterness of those early experiences was simply too pervasive, so that it tainted the lessons they taught in ways they never actually intended."

A melancholy silence settled after her admission, and Rìona turned her attention to her pot of water, which was slowly cooling. She bent to soak her wash rag in it, finding it still pleasantly warm. Suddenly reminded of her partial nudity, Alistair flushed and turned away again.

Rìona frowned. Enough was enough.

"Alistair, look at me."

"Rìona..."

"You've carried your point. Now I have one of my own to carry."

Slowly, he turned. He didn't just peer at her over his shoulder, but actually turned to face her fully. His eyes, however, remained on her face.

"This body may not be all I have to offer, but it's certainly a significant portion. Allowing yourself to acknowledge it won't diminish me. Ignoring it will."

Alistair smiled self-consciously, ducking his head, slightly. When he looked up again, she was pleased to note that his eyes weren't quite so determinedly fixed on her face.

"What do you want me to do?"

"Absolutely nothing," Rìona said calmly, wringing her rag out and beginning to wash her face and neck. "Just... see all of me. Acknowledge all of me."

He sat there calmly, watching as she washed with a reserve that gave no indication of that flash of heat and desire she'd seen in his eyes earlier. Rìona wasn't sure whether or not to be disappointed by that fact.

She bent to rinse her cloth again, and that was when he moved. Approaching her, Alistair took the cloth from her hand and wrung it out. Rìona turned around at his gesture and closed her eyes with a sigh as he drew the warm cloth across the back of her shoulders.

When his other hand came to rest carefully upon her upper arm, it shook slightly.

She understood the feeling all too well.

How strange that she should respond to him like this. With her penchant for aggressive lovers, she never would have imagined that a bashful virgin who'd nearly had all the initiative beaten out of him would have been the one she'd fall in love with. And yet...

...She could feel it within him, that _potential_ for aggression, carefully leashed, waiting. But on top of it all, there was his goodness, his tenderness, his caring. The fact that he regarded sex as being more significant that just an opportunity for casual pleasure meant that when he did give himself, he would be giving much more than just his body. And, though he was taking his time about it, it was undeniable that he was offering it all to her.

The strokes of the cloth were maddeningly sensual as he washed her shoulders and back, quickly reducing Rìona to a breathless mass of longing. Maker, she wanted him to touch her, _actually_ touch her. She whimpered slightly when she felt him press closer to her and his breath brushed her ear as he murmured, "Is this more the sort of courtship you had in mind?"

"Something along these lines, yes."

She felt him press his face into her hair and shuddered. So close! Why wouldn't he just—? "I think I've kept my distance because when you're too close, I can't think straight. Being near you drives me mad. I'm afraid I'll suddenly become... all hands, each and every one of them _groping._"

"I don't necessarily object to groping. Honestly."

"So you say now." His hands landed on her shoulders and began to stroke down her arms, raising goose-flesh over the entire surface of her body.

She turned her head to meet his eyes as he hovered there over her shoulder. "Maker's blood, Alistair, _please!"_

And then his lips were upon hers and she was turning in his arms, and she understood that whatever memory she'd possessed of that long-ago embrace in Denerim was but a pale facsimile of what it actually felt like to kiss him. Rìona closed her eyes and shivered, sinking into him. This was it, then. They were really doing this, consequences and complications and potential for heartbreak and devastation be damned. It felt like jumping blindfolded off a ledge, with no idea how far she would fall.

With nothing left to do but wait for the impact of landing, she opened to Alistair's lips and knew she wasn't falling alone.

Hunger. Maker, he was so hungry! She could feel that craving in the trembling of his hand as it engulfed the back of her head, fingers splaying over her scalp. There was a coiled tension in his frame when her arms wound about his neck, as though he'd turn feral and ravenous if he just allowed himself to let go. And she wanted him to. Sweet Andraste, yes, she wanted him to.

"Rìona..." he groaned, breaking away to press his lips to her brow, his breath heavy against her hair. With a long sigh, Rìona sagged against him, clinging to his shoulders and letting him bear her weight. His other arm came about her waist, drawing her close. His body shook against hers and at length, he pulled away.

"There's... werewolves... to consider."

His fingers, however, didn't seem to be giving a great deal of thought to the danger of attack. They slid heedlessly up her ribs to come to rest at the bottom edge of her frayed breast bindings at the side. Rìona sucked in her breath, arching slightly, silently willing his hand to continue.

Instead, it moved lower, caressing over the gentle curve of her abdomen.

Rìona flinched, suddenly overwhelmed by insecurity. She made herself stay still, refusing by sheer dint of will not to retreat as his other hand joined the first to circumscribe the small mound there, his fingers spreading across her skin.

When he drew back and looked down, she'd never felt more exposed and vulnerable in her life.

She couldn't read his expression, as he solemnly studied her gravid belly. And then he lifted his eyes to hers, and they were full of tenderness and wonder. He swooped forward to kiss her again, claiming her lips with an urgency that spoke more of desperate emotion than desire.

Again his hands moved up her ribs, his fingers moving restlessly against her skin, and Rìona waited breathlessly. He hesitated, long enough for her to brace herself for the inevitable disappointment of his withdrawal, and then his hands met between her breasts and began pulling on the knots of her bindings.

"I just... need to see you. All of you," Alistair whispered, his shaking hands fumbling with the knot. Nodding her acquiescence, Rìona lent her aid to the endeavor, taking over and unwinding the bindings, gritting her teeth against the inevitable stab of pain that came with the sudden lack of support.

His eyes were most assuredly _not_ upon her face as she let the linen strip fall away. She might have been amused, had she not been so utterly enraptured.

"Sweet Andraste..." he sighed. When his trembling fingers brushed the side-swell of her breast, she shivered, and when his palm cupped its weight and his thumb brushed the peak, she gasped. Her nipple hardened instantly and his fingertips grazed wonderingly over the small knot it formed. She arched, pressing into his hand as his lips sought hers again.

The more he touched her, the more she became aware of the fact that her skin was gritty with several days worth of dirt acquired traveling and fighting. Despite the pleasure, she pulled away, once again unaccountably self-conscious.

"I... need to bathe," she murmured as his eyes searched hers. "And... there are werewolves to consider, still."

After a moment, Alistair nodded, stepping away from her. "I, um..." He cleared his throat roughly. "I'll go see about setting up a watch rotation."

When she returned to the large chamber wherein they had chosen to make their camp, she found camp had been set up perfectly well without her. There were no tents, of course, nor any campfire. The underground chamber was illuminated only by the torches they had made and Wynne's wisp of light as she sat upon her bedroll, reading. Leliana was strumming her lute softly, careful not to render it impossible to hear an approaching attack. Zevran was already in his bedroll, for his was second watch, and Sten and Shale were positioned by the entrances at opposite ends of the chamber.

With a self-satisfied smile, Alistair strode toward Rìona and took the pot of water and cleaning rag from her hands, disappearing with both back the way Rìona had come. She was left alone to locate her bedroll amongst those scattered throughout the large chamber. They couldn't position themselves in a marginally more secure cluster, for the fallen masonry and encroaching roots that sprawled across the ruins made it impossible to find sufficient floor space. But with the entrances both guarded, it was safe enough for them to spread out around the huge chamber, and so they had laid out their bedrolls wherever they had found sufficient space.

The reason for Alistair's smug expression became apparent when Rìona located hers in a far corner, for he'd laid his beside it.

Her pulse tripped for a moment before her heart remembered its proper function and resumed beating. Maker's breath, he was being bold, wasn't he? she thought wonderingly. A more unequivocal statement he couldn't possibly have made, under the circumstances.

Again, she felt that strange sense of self-consciousness, so foreign to her purportedly shameless nature. It felt as if all eyes were upon her, which she knew they were not. Shale was out of sight at the opposite end of the chamber, Sten was polishing his sword, Wynne was immersed in her book and Leliana's back was toward Rìona as she tuned her lute. She turned to look at Zevran again, but his eyes were closed, and his face relaxed in repose.

No one seemed to think it at all odd that Alistair had just staked his place at her side and in her bed. And so, with a smile flitting about her lips, Rìona shrugged off the unaccustomed touch of bashfulness and lay down on her bedroll, awaiting him.

When Alistair returned, his skin was damp from washing and beads of water still dappled his neck and the edges of his hair from where he had splashed his face. Despite the forwardness of his arrangements, his posture was cautious as he approached. Rìona watched him calmly as he set aside the empty pot and positioned his sword and shield where he could grab them quickly if need be. It did not escape her notice that he'd positioned his own bedroll between hers and the rest of the chamber, where he could shield her from anything that managed to get past Shale or Sten.

The he doused his torch and settled upon his bedroll—not touching her, but merely watching her, that slight edge of caution still in his eyes.

Finally, he spoke. "I hope you don't mind—"

"I don't."

"I, um, figure it's safe enough. I'm not likely to forget myself with so little privacy."

"I'm not sure I'd mind if you did."

He gave her his shy, self-effacing smile. "I suppose with the dangers of werewolves and angry trees, and all that, now isn't the time to leave the ruins and run off into the woods alone?"

She laughed softly. "Inadvisable, as well as downright conspicuous."

"Oh, _now_ you develop a sense of modesty!"

"It's _your_ modesty I'm trying to consider," she shot back quietly. "I don't know if it's possible to actually die of blushing, but I'm certain we'd find out when you strolled back in and had to deal with all the knowing looks and smirking."

"You raise a very good point," he chuckled. And then laughter fled as he reached out to lightly caress the side of her face with his fingertips. She wasn't quite certain how they moved, but the next moment they were pressed together, mouths eagerly seeking one another. The kiss deepened as Rìona rolled onto her back and drew Alistair down to her and his fingers threaded through her hair, his hand seeming impossibly large as it cupped the back of her head. Her lips opened and her tongue slid along his as it advanced.

It was a long moment before Alistair drew away with a shuddering sigh. His mouth traveled across her cheek and down the line of her jaw. Her awareness of their lack of privacy lessened in direct proportion with the weakening of her resolve, particularly when his tongue darted out to taste her neck. All the arousal that she had damped down earlier surged back to life, leaving her aching, yearning. Her thighs parted, bracketing his own thigh as he lay half-above her. Her breath caught in a gasp when he shifted, adjusting his position slightly, and putting pressure firmly upon her sex in the process.

"What?" Alistair breathed, lifting his head at her reaction. Meeting his eyes, Rìona deliberately rocked against him. She let him see her pleasure, watched his pupils dilate in response. He wedged his thigh more firmly between hers, ground it against her, and she mewled softly in pleasure.

"Is that good?" he whispered, transfixed, as her eyes drifted shut and she lifted her hips again, seeking more.

"Dear Maker, yes..." she sighed. She could feel hardness pressing against her as he gave another push with his thigh. There was something deliciously naughty about their lack of privacy, and the struggle to remain silent enough that she could not be heard over the soft strumming of Leliana's lute and the grating sound of Sten honing his sword on a whetstone.

His hand slid under her linen shirt to cup her unbound breast, his thumb stroking across her nipple. Rìona bit her lip to keep from moaning too loudly, pressing hard against him, seeking more.

"How do I—?" Alistair's soft murmur faltered, and she opened her eyes to see his head bowed. Drawing a nervous breath, he began again. "How do I give you pleasure?"

His eyes gleamed golden in the faint torchlight from across the chamber, at once sober and voracious. Drawing a deep breath, she untied the knotted drawstring of her breeches and took his hand, guiding it down her belly. Then she buried her face in his shoulder to prevent crying out as his fingers began to explore her slick folds.

This was no time or place to teach him all the nuances and intricacies involved in pleasuring her, and so she settled for the basics.

"Here," she whispered, guiding his fingers, urging them into a slow, circling motion. After a moment of faltering, he picked up her rhythm. A moment or two beyond that was all it took, before her thighs clamped together and her body seized and shuddered. Her throat arched and strained with the effort of remaining silent.

Slowly her eyes opened and Alistair was staring at her in the semi-darkness.

"That was..." he gazed at her in wonder, his mouth working as though to find words.

Her fingers covered his lips. "That's only the beginning," she vowed. He kissed her fingertips, and then her palm, and finally his head dipped down to kiss her again, and Rìona opened to him, welcomed his probing tongue as he grew bolder, more demanding. She could feel him, hard and insistent against her hip, and her hand slipped down to cup him through his breeches.

"Oh, dear Maker..." Alistair tore his mouth from hers as he nudged urgently against her palm, shyness and reserve losing ground to need.

Watching his eyes, she began to pull at the laces of his breeches, slowly and deliberately, giving him a chance to tell her to stop. Instead, he lay there waiting, tense and trembling in anticipation. They sighed together when her fingers slipped inside his braies and curled around his erection. Without hesitation, he pumped into her hand.

"Sweet Andraste..." he growled softly into her hair.

"Let go," Rìona whispered, watching him as intently as he'd watched her moments before. "Just let go."

Groaning, he surged into the sheath formed by the ring of her fingers and palm. She squeezed hard, feeling the wide ridge pull back through her hand before pushing out again, the loose sheath of skin aiding the glide of his shaft through her palm.

"Rìona..." Alistair breathed her name. Gradually the tempo of his hips increased, became less controlled. And still she watched him. She felt the moment when he gave himself over to his need completely, when control was lost. His hand shot down and captured the head of his cock and he made a strangled sound as he gave a few more quick thrusts and shuddered.

"Maker's breath, what you do to me..." he panted, slowly opening his eyes. He withdrew his hand from within his breeches and glanced around, clearly looking for someplace to wipe his palm.

Rìona caught his hand and brought it to her mouth. Only the presence of the others stifled Alistair's surprised squeak when her tongue darted out to capture the seed that was leaking between his fingers. But he opened his palm to her, and she cleaned it with slow, sensual strokes of her tongue. She made love to his hand, drew his fingers into her mouth one by one and sucked them clean. She smiled when she made him flinch ticklishly when her tongue delved deep between his fingers.

All the while, he watched her, enraptured. There was no hint of revulsion on his face, and it wasn't until she realized that such a thing was exactly what she was watching for that Rìona realized she'd been testing him. She still hadn't let go of her fear that someday he would discover he found her shamelessness repulsive.

When she caught herself doing it, she made herself stop. Not here, not now, not with him. With Alistair, she vowed, she would not look for the angle, the catch, the hidden trap or secret advantage. For once, she would relinquish the lessons her parents had taught her about power and how to use pleasure to her advantage. If he still had reservations, that was a risk she would have to take, but she would allow nothing but pleasure in their intimacies. No games. No gambits.

Releasing his hand, she smiled tremulously, once again feeling self-conscious. But Alistair merely kissed her, tasting himself on her lips and tongue and sighing agreeably.

Feeling once more that exhilarating sense of falling, she rolled away, nestled her backside against him, and fell asleep in his arms.


	39. Chapter Thirty Nine: Reprieve

Rìona was trying to kill him. It was the only possible explanation.

He'd known it the moment she walked out of her tent wearing her new... Alistair wasn't certain what to call it. The word "armor" certainly didn't seem appropriate to describe two scraps of leather that would barely have covered a single one of his thighs. Never mind that spring was late this year, the days were cool and the nights downright chilly; it left more of her skin bared than it covered. Unless she wore that ridiculously tattered cloak of hers, her arms were completely uncovered, not to mention her back, and Maker's breath, how did someone as short as she was manage to have that much leg?

But the real danger was that expanse of skin that started just under her breasts and ended well below her navel, which swelled softly and seemed to get rounder and more eye-catching with each passing day.

His hands itched to touch it, and not in that cooing way Leliana sometimes did, exclaiming over how adorable it was. Though he'd seen it before, something about the utterly unabashed way it was displayed in this new armor of hers was escalating what had once been a curiosity to a fixation.

He wanted to seize it, own it, make it his. He wanted to lay claim to it, conquering it like an unexplored stretch of wilderness, and use it as a base of operations from which to assault the surrounding territories.

He knew there was a joke about planting a flagpole waiting to be made there, but the imagery _that_ particular line of thought provoked paved the path to madness.

The sight of Rìona, with her shoulders lifted and her bowstring drawn back, looking like some savagely fecund barbarian goddess of the hunt, was almost enough to make him forget they were in the middle of a fight. When they'd dispatched that cabal of blood mages after departing the Dalish camp, it had been all Alistair could do not to drag her into the forest afterward and behave every bit as uncivilized as the sight of her made him feel.

Matters certainly weren't aided by the fact that, since that night in the elven ruins when he had spread his bedroll beside Rìona's, he'd barely had a moment alone with her in which they weren't both completely exhausted. The next day they had found the werewolves lair and were drawn into mediating what actually turned out to be a centuries-old grudge on the part of the Dalish keeper, Zathrian.

After that, they rushed back to the Dalish camp to report the keeper's demise and the ending of the curse, traveling hard to make up for lost time. Often they broke camp before dawn, ate cold rations while they walked, and didn't pitch camp until the last vestiges of light were about to fade from the sky. The further west they traveled, the more they encountered bands of darkspawn, which meant delays to fight, and the inevitable healing and cleaning of armor and weapons that followed. It also meant that they were once again keeping two people on watch, in addition to Shale. That change had been implemented after a number of shrieks attacked their camp in the middle of the night.

Two days after leaving the Dalish camp, they encountered a band of qunari mercenaries Loghain had hired. The opportunity to put a dent in Loghain's forces was not one to be missed and so the afternoon was spent in brutal combat. They barely had time to tend their injuries and make camp before the sun set. The spring rains began that night, slowing them down even further.

And through it all was Rìona's ever-present sense of urgency, pressing them harder, faster, longer. Now well into the fifth month of her pregnancy, she feared she was running out of time to gather their army and confront Loghain before her confinement.

Though Alistair had taken up residence in Rìona's tent at night since they left the elven ruins, the pace at which they were pushing themselves meant that when neither of them was on watch, they could muster the energy to do little other than sleep. The explorations they had begun that night in the elven ruins progressed very little, and not nearly as far as Alistair ached to take them, when he wasn't so weary he didn't even want to think about moving.

The day after they dispatched the qunari mercenaries, they finally reached the West Road, and there they came across the dwarf Bodhan Feddic. This not only gave them an opportunity to resupply, but also gave Rìona a chance to get some of the news of the land. She spoke to the traveling merchant long into the night, and when Alistair awoke from his exhausted slumber hours after he'd gone to bed alone, it was to find Rìona sitting in the tent beside him, weeping silently into her hands.

"What is it?" Instantly alert, Alistair sat up, drawing her hands away from her face to look at her in the faint light of the campfire through the canvas of the tent.

"Bann Grainne is dead."

Alistair searched his memory. "The, um... the one whose troops we encountered after we left Denerim, along the North Road?"

"Yes." She nodded, her face drawn and haunted. "Her husband was leading them at Winter's Breath because she was heavy with child. He was killed in that battle, and Bann Grainne left without most of her troops. A few weeks ago, Loghain's men delivered notice that she was to surrender half the grain remaining in her granaries in restitution to the crown for the part her bannorn played in the 'insurrection' at Winter's Breath. In protest, Grainne burnt her granaries to the ground, setting the torch to them with her own hand. Loghain's men stormed her keep and ran her through in her bedchamber. A wet nurse couldn't be found for her babe, and their goats were not in milk. They had to feed him cow's milk and thin gruel. He took a flux and died a week later. He was barely two months old."

"Maker's breath!" Alistair groaned.

"She was an ally of my father's." Rìona wiped her face and sniffled. "They often voted together in the Landsmeet. She was a guest at Highever a few times in my childhood. She was of an age with Fergus and there was some discussion of a possible match. I've dined with her. She helped teach me to dance when I was just a girl."

"I'm so sorry," he murmured, but Rìona's attention was turned inward, her eyes distant and unseeing.

"There have also been a number of deaths near Highever. Some of Loghain's troops on their way to occupy Highever port were ambushed by hunters from Oswin—Bann Valdric of Oswin is one of the banns sworn to Highever. In retribution, Loghain's troops hunted down the men responsible and hung them from poles, leaving them to freeze, or starve to death." She turned her tormented gaze to him. "We have to stop this, Alistair!"

"We will!" He vowed, pulling her down to lie against his chest as she began to cry again. It was some time later that she finally fell asleep, while Alistair lay there, his thoughts churning as he made plans. 

* * *

When dawn came, Rìona was still in her exhausted slumber, and so Alistair rose alone and began organizing their company for the day. It was nearly two hours later that Rìona finally awoke, cursing loudly within the tent as she realized how late it was.

"Why didn't anyone wake me?" she demanded as she emerged from the tent, still lacing up the sides of that maddening scrap of leather that encased her breasts these days.

"I didn't see any need to." Alistair forced himself to look away, despite the tendency of his eyes to be drawn helplessly to all that bared skin. It was hard to keep his brain engaged when he focused on it too hard.

"No... no need? Alistair, it's halfway to midday! We should have been underway hours ago! You _know_ how badly we need to make good time to Orzammar."

"I do." His voice was commendably calm. Strange, that it was getting easier to make these sorts of decisions, even without her approval. "That's why we're taking a day to rest and inventory our equipment. With spring finally starting and the days getting warmer, we can lighten our load considerably by trading in some of our winter equipment to Bodhan, who has agreed to stay on with us an extra day. We don't need quite so many furs for our bedrolls, we can trade some of our woolen garments for lighter linen clothes, and we've got a number of weapons and pieces of armor that we're not using, because they've been damaged or we've found better along the way. Once we do that, we'll make much better time each day because we won't be so weighed down."

Rìona nodded thoughtfully. "Those are excellent thoughts. You're right, of course. Thank you. But surely that process need not take all day? Let's plan to break camp by midday."

Adamantly, Alistair shook his head. "No. We're not going to make very good time, or be very effective in a fight, if we're all too worn down to put one foot in front of the other. We'll take today to rest up. There's a stream nearby where we can wash our linens and bathe, and then we can get some much-needed sleep. Shale has agreed to keep watch alone tonight, so we can all get a full night's rest."

She looked as though she might protest, but then she blew out her breath and bowed her head. "I see. Very well, then. It appears you have this all under control. I'll go start sorting through my things to see what I can unload."

The stream proved far too cold for bathing—and the day too breezy and cool to remain outside long to wash beside the stream—much to Leliana's very vocal displeasure. Always mindful of opportunities for creature comfort, it was her suggestion that they construct a lean-to shelter on the windward side of a clearing next to the stream, with a fire nearby, much as Morrigan had always done when she traveled with him. There, they could heat water while they washed their clothing in the stream, and then use the shelter to stay out of the wind as they bathed, while their clothing dried on the flat, warmed boulders beside the fire. It was Wynne's suggestion that they also add a magical ward to the lean-to, which would sustain a sphere of warmth around it much as Wynne did for herself when she kept watch in the cold night. By that means, they could bathe and wait for their clothes to dry in comfort.

Sten disdained the plan and marched down to the stream with a growl, but even he looked miserably cold, his dark skin nearly purple, when he returned. The rest of their party gladly embraced the scheme, emptying and refilling the pot of water and building up the fire as necessary before yielding the comfort and privacy of the shelter to the next person.

As she usually did, Rìona deferred her own comfort until her people had been seen to, and Alistair chose to wait with her. There was a slight smirk on Zevran's face and a knowing gleam in Leliana's eyes that suggested they both knew full well why he dallied. He'd blushed horribly to discover he and Rìona hadn't managed to be nearly as silent that night in the elven ruins as they had meant to, a fact which had been brought to his attention by a considerable amount of sly teasing on Leliana's part. But today, he found he didn't mind. He had no intention of letting a little thing like embarrassment deter him from his plans.

By the time Wynne, Leliana and Zevran had finished their turns bathing, Rìona was smiling at him with a melting look in her eyes. Alistair wasn't certain which pleased him more, that she was fully in favor of the plan, or that she was rested and relaxed enough to let go of her constant fretting and sense of overwhelming responsibility in order to grasp the possibilities this opportunity afforded.

It was mid-afternoon when he took the sack containing Rìona's linens from her hands, slung it over his shoulder along with his own, and took her elbow. He ignored Leliana's giggling and flatly refused to meet Wynne's amused, indulgent gaze as he steered Rìona away from camp toward the clearing by the stream. The closer they drew to the stream, however, the more nervous Alistair became. It was ridiculous that he should feel that way. After what they had done that night in the ruins, and with the fact that he now slept in her tent, what he intended now shouldn't seem so... monumental... as it did. And yet his palms were sweating, his heart racing, and the sense of certainty that had guided him all morning as he took charge and arranged this day of rest had utterly abandoned him.

The moment they were alone, with the warmth of the lean-to just a few steps away, he _wanted_ to simply snatch her to him and bear her to the ground. But a gentleman didn't behave that way, did he? So what _was_ he supposed to do? Make a declaration of intent? Ask permission? Attempt a few tentative overtures and hope she responded favorably?

Maker. It hadn't seemed this difficult in the elven ruins. Once he'd kissed her, everything else had simply... happened.

There was a bemused expression on Rìona's face as she knelt by the stream to begin washing her clothes with the lye soap they had purchased from Bodhan Feddic. Clearly she was aware of Alistair's sudden nervousness, but she said nothing, merely waited for him to make his intentions known. She was shivering, for Andraste's sake, in her Dalish armor as she knelt there in the chill breeze. She submerged her clothes in the frigid waters of the stream and then scrubbed them against the rocks before rinsing and wringing the water out and laying them to dry on a large, flat boulder beside the fire. After a moment, cursing himself for his hesitation, Alistair knelt and began to do the same with his own clothing.

They passed the time silently that way, though Alistair's thoughts were anything but quiet. This, he thought, was what he always did. He over-thought things until he was crippled with indecision. He found himself wishing Rìona would take the lead, that she would seduce him and push him past his fear. He wouldn't have to be the one to decide, then, or the one to risk failing if things went badly.

Of course, that was precisely the habit he'd been trying so hard to break lately, wasn't it? That was how he had always come at things, holding back, waiting for someone else to take the lead.

Annoyed with himself, Alistair wrung his final linen shirt out as though he was attempting to strangle it, steeling himself to say—_something._ And then he looked at Rìona.

Having finished her own laundry, she stood unsteadily, grimacing with the ache of having knelt too long. She placed her fists at the small of her back and arched, stretching with a long sigh of relief. The motion pushed her rounded belly outward, and Alistair promptly swallowed his tongue.

The savage inclination he'd been trying to suppress got loose and clubbed the gentleman he was trying to be over the head, knocking him insensible. Suddenly over-thinking matters was no longer a problem.

Alistair tossed his shirt aside, surged to his feet and grabbed Rìona by the waist, pulling her against him. He nearly lifted her off the ground as his lips found hers hungrily. She made a startled sound, and then she melted against him, opening readily to his mouth, her arms encircling his neck and her caresses began to roam down over his shoulders. With his shirt in a sodden wad at their feet, her hands were unobstructed as her fingers kneaded firmly into the flesh of his back. Her leather-encased breasts were pressed hard against his chest, and the leather strips of her war skirt did nothing to impede his grasp as he seized her backside to pull her closer.

He knew he really ought to bathe first; they'd been traveling and fighting for days with nothing but a bucket of cold water to wipe down with at the end of each day. But Rìona didn't seem to mind as her lips sought his neck, and then her teeth were doing marvelous things to his shoulders and collarbone. Nothing seemed to matter but her skin beneath his hands, so much bare skin it was driving him mad wanting to touch it all, but also not nearly enough. His shaking fingers began to tug at the leather laces up the sides of her armor and when it loosened, his hands plunged inside, only to be frustrated by her breast bindings.

Smiling, Rìona drew away, doffing the abbreviated cuirass and draping it carefully over a nearby tree limb. She walked backward as she began pulling at the knotted linen wrapped around her breasts, and Alistair followed, unwilling to let her get beyond the reach of his hands. Warmth surrounded him, beginning at his arms as he reached for her and engulfing his body when he moved forward, and he realized they were now within the sphere of Wynne's ward.

Oh, that was _much_ better.

With eager hands he helped her unwind the long linen strip, only to come up short when Rìona hissed, covering her breasts with her palms and lifting them as she grimaced.

Concerned, he pulled back. "Does that hurt?"

She shook her head. "Only for a moment, when the bindings first come off." She released a slow breath. "There. It's already better."

His hands covered hers, and slowly she eased her own away. Then there was only his hands on her flesh and he had to close his eyes for a moment, the sight was so powerful. He hadn't nearly gotten his fill of it that day in the ruins. He wanted to... he wasn't really sure what he wanted to do, now that he had his hands on her with the privacy and freedom to do anything he wished. That had been a bit of a goal, in and of itself, and he hadn't put a great deal of thought into the follow-up.

He was a mass of conflicting desires, wanting to wait passively as Rìona guided and pleasured him and at the same time wanting to touch and taste and know every inch of her _right now_. But it was the sight of her belly, there, just beneath his hands, that settled the matter.

That hard, rounded belly, so flagrantly displayed, did something to him. The knowledge that it was his brother's child she carried awoke something dark within him, something primal and possessive. It was driving him mad, had been driving him mad for days and days since she'd gotten that damned Dalish armor.

He surrendered to that madness.

Without ever intending to do anything of the sort, he was on his knees on the ragged and ruined fur that had been lain on the ground under the lean-to, pulling her down with him, practically ripping off her boots. He wasn't sure if she unfastened the pleated leather around her waist or if he did, but she definitely lifted her hips to allow him to slide it down her thighs, and her smallclothes afterward.

And then she was on her back before him and he was upon her, sucking and licking and groping, touching her more roughly than he'd ever thought to touch her, not so much caressing as _laying claim_. She may have said something about slowing down, but he was beyond hearing anything but the roaring of his own pulse in his ears.

Madness. That was the only word for it, that Alistair found himself lying between her legs with no knowledge of how he came to be there, frantically pushing his breeches and braies down his hips. When he felt the head of his shaft brush the slick softness of her folds, any remaining hope of control was lost and he was pushing and prodding blindly, no idea where he needed to go but knowing he needed to be there right now.

Her hand was there, guiding him, and when he pushed she parted to him and then he was inside her and Maker's breath! she was tight and hot and wet around him. Rìona whimpered a little, her fingernails digging into his shoulders, but he was beyond noticing. He pulled back and pushed deeper, and deeper. He wasn't sure that keening sound she was making was a good thing or not and he knew he should slow down enough to find out but she felt too good and the only thought that made any sense to him at all was _more_.

Rìona's knees came up to grip his hips at the same time he shoved himself up on his arms and reared back. He opened his eyes and saw her lying there beneath him, her eyes clenched shut and her face contorted by something somewhere between ecstasy and pain. He surged forward and her mouth opened on a long moan, her hands gouging his upper arms. Even that pain felt good and so he repeated the movement, driving harder, deeper, and she cried out again on the next thrust.

This wasn't progressing anything like the way he'd imagined it would. It wasn't loving and romantic, it was savage and needful. He'd thought he'd explore her slowly, pleasure her, but instead he found himself simply _taking_ her and Maker help him, he couldn't bring himself to care about the other things as his control began to fray and unravel.

He drove into her again, and again, straining and pumping. And then he was beyond the point of restraint, spilling into her with a desperate groan amid a tumult of wonder and exultation.

Shaking, his skin dripping with sweat, her buried his face against her neck and lay there a moment, panting. And slowly it dawned on him that she _wasn't_ panting. The way her hands petted and caressed his back was more soothing than passionate or relieved, and the tense stillness in her body put something within him on alert. She wasn't sharing in this feeling that his bones had all melted and his muscles were incapable of working any longer. Suddenly a single thought swam to the surface of the haze of pleasure that was clouding his mind, reminding him that she'd left his brother's bed unfulfilled to seek out another man.

_That_ registered.

Though he wanted nothing more than to just lay beside her and bask in this feeling of triumph and relief, Alistair drew back. Rìona whimpered in discontent as he slipped out of her. He looked down and his hand moved down her body, between her thighs, sliding through the wetness upon her folds. Her hips shifted a little as he brushed across that spot she had guided him to that night in the ruins, and he sought it again, more deliberately.

"What do you need?" he asked, and suddenly it seemed like the most important question ever.

Rìona mewled as he rubbed circles around the knot, arching, pushing against his hand. "Your fingers... inside."

When he slid his fingers into her, she was slick and so very wet. The knowledge that at least some of that wetness was _his_ struck him, and it was a heady revelation. All the months of frustration and confusion and wanting had come to an end. He'd left his mark upon her, within her, and if Alistair wasn't naïve enough to think that meant everything he'd once assumed it did, still the primal sense that she was now _his_ surged through him.

She murmured her encouragement, and his fingers began to move, mimicking the motions his body had made moments before. He adjusted his speed and force at each command of _harder_ or _faster_ or just _more._ Soon his fingers were plunging rapidly in and out as Rìona gritted her teeth and arched and made feral sounds. Now it was her skin covered in sweat, her expression strained as she gasped, "Oh, Maker, Alistair. Yes. Like that!"

Her body grew taut. Her sounds were those of pleasure, but there was an edge of frustration to her groans made it seem as though she struggled—though with what he couldn't say. He watched her reactions, searching for something, some clue as to what she needed. He wanted to ask her what she needed, but he knew she was too far gone to answer. Then inspiration struck and he sought that knot again with the fingers of his other hand and began to stroke like she'd taught him to.

And, just like that, she shattered. In utter awe, Alistair watched it happen. He heard her shriek scare the birds from their perches, saw the helpless flailing of her body, felt the convulsions of her sheath as it gripped his fingers and fluttered.

It was magnificent. Nothing like the gentle and easy pleasure he'd brought her that night in the ruins. Like his own need, it had been savage and unrestrained, nearly violent in its intensity. But as it passed, Rìona sank into the furs bonelessly, her expression blissfully relieved as her panting slowed. When her eyes opened, the melting look was back in them. Before another instant had passed, he was lying beside her, drawing her against his body and kissing her desperately.

After a moment, she tucked her head into his neck and just snuggled against him, sighing as the sweat on their skin cooled and dried.

Alistair chuckled softly. "That was nothing like I imagined it would be."

"Mm, how did you imagine it would be?"

"I'm not even sure. Not quite so mad, perhaps. More tenderness and romance, less frantic pawing and groping."

"Tenderness and romance have their place," Rìona shrugged with a smile. "But then, so do frantic pawing and groping. After the last week or so, I rather think I needed the latter."

He stroked his hand down her ribs until his fingers encountered the mound of her belly, and he grew still. "How...?" he halted, swallowing, hating himself for the impulse to ask the question. "How was it with Cailan?"

He saw her start to smile, saw a teasing response rise automatically to her lips. But when she looked at him, saw how sincere he was, she swallowed it and grew serious. "I played a role with Cailan, Alistair," she said, dropping her eyes. "What happened between us wasn't real; it was all a lie."

"But what did happen?"

"I made him force me," she sighed. "I didn't have time to draw things out, and I had to make him think I wasn't an easy conquest he could forget. So I played the reluctant maid when he was set upon seduction. I kept escalating the game until he was desperate. I even made him think I'd use deadly force to defend my honor, to awaken his need for violence, to make him see me as an enemy to be vanquished."

Alistair swallowed hard, staring at her in disbelief. "He... ravished you?"

"No!" Rìona shook her head emphatically. "I was willing. But he didn't know that. He thought did. I _made_ him think it, and his remorse gave me the handle I needed to manipulate him into offering to wed me, and it gave me the influence to convince him to heed Duncan's advice."

"But if you refused and he didn't stop, isn't it the same thing?" he persisted, disturbed. "It doesn't matter that you were pretending; as far as _he_ knew, you were unwilling. He should have stopped."

"Perhaps you're right," she said, resting her head on his shoulder once more. "Cailan was a very spoiled and impetuous man. Good-natured, yes, and very kind so long as life pleased him, but he saw no reason that what he desired should not be his. It was those very traits that led him to think he could go against a Blight with an insufficient army, simply so he could claim the glory of defeating it all for himself. I knew that, long before I ever went to Ostagar. It wasn't for his sterling character that I intended to wed him, after all. I was young and foolish and nothing mattered except my vain ambition. I didn't know any better. I didn't think what life might be like with a man who could be 'made' to rape a woman. By the time I realized I didn't want him, and that being queen wasn't worth being saddled with him, it was too late. I was trapped in my own snare."

"I'm sorry," he murmured, kissing the top of her head. "I shouldn't have brought it up."

"Actually I imagine it's better that you did." He felt her shrug against his chest. "I can't claim to be proud of all the things I've done in my past, and you'd be more than human if you weren't at least curious about all of it. I don't think ignoring it is the best way to handle it. I think that way lies jealousy and suspicion. So... I'll promise to answer your questions honestly, when you have them, if you'll promise to try not to hold the answers I give you against me."

"I think I can manage that," Alistair murmured, and prayed he was telling the truth.

They rose and used water from the pot warming by the fire to bathe, cleaning themselves of the dust and grit of travel, as well as the sweat and fluids their lovemaking had left behind. Alistair felt absurdly shy about removing the breeches he'd only managed to push down his hips before, but then Rìona was there, kneeling before him, her eyes shining as she drew his breeches down his legs. She took the warm, wet cloth and began to _wash_ him.

Modesty was unceremoniously discarded, relegated to the scrap heap whereon things such as _rational thought_ and _gentlemanly conduct_ languished. His head fell back as he surrendered to the sensation of the slightly coarse cloth on his softened shaft—which didn't really look to remain soft for long.

And when he was thoroughly clean, oh blessed Andraste, her _mouth..._

By the time they had finished washing and sought the comfort of the ragged pelt beneath the lean-to, Alistair was once again aroused and eager. And yet the overwhelming urgency of his initial need had been well sated, and he was looking forward to taking his time. He attempted to remember all the things she had told him about pleasure so long ago in the Fade and put that lesson to use.

Determinedly ignoring her breasts for a moment, he leaned in close and began to explore her ear with his mouth. He traced the shell with his tongue, pulled on her earlobe with his lips. When she gave a pleased hum and tilted her head to give him better access, he took it for encouragement and sucked lightly.

When she closed her eyes and sighed his name, he smiled triumphantly, as though he'd performed a wondrous feat.

The skin of her neck tasted marvelous and smelled even better. He thought he could bury his face in the hollow of her throat and simply breathe the scent of her in all day. Soon he was licking there less for her pleasure than his own. The tendon between her neck and shoulder practically begged him to nibble upon it and when he did, her hips rocked and she moaned softly. Maker, he wanted to hear that sound again, and again, as he sucked on that spot until a deep red bruise began to bloom.

His hand returned to her breast, this time with a distinct purpose in mind. His thumb brushed across the peak of her nipple and there was a new sound, an even better sound. When his fingers closed over her nipple and squeezed gently, she hummed her approval and murmured, "Harder."

"Won't that hurt?"

"A little. Sometimes a little is good. And, once in a great while, a little _more_ is even better."

To demonstrate, her own fingers closed on the small point of his own nipple. The first caresses she bestowed were electric by themselves, but seemed to become less so. Then she began to pinch, lightly at first, and then harder. It was as though that pressure went directly to his shaft, making him pulse with need.

When she let him go, he obligingly mimicked what she had done, squeezing harder and, Andraste's mercy, the way she moved as she bit her lip and whimpered made his body surge in ways he'd never imagined could result from seeing pain on the face of the woman he loved.

When he released her she sagged limply against him, panting in a way that was almost better than the initial reaction to the pain had been. Her eyes when they opened to meet his were liquid and strangely peaceful.

"Again," she gasped after a moment.

His fingers closed upon her other nipple and he pinched firmly. Her body went rigid, and she writhed against him and fought to pull away. Instinct told him not to let go, despite her struggles, until her mouth opened on a wordless cry.

"Enough for now," she whispered as she caught her breath, and Alistair's hand gently soothed over the nipple he'd handled so roughly and her response was such that it seemed the gentle caress was much more intense than it had been before, as though she were now more sensitive even to light touches.

As he stroked her, his hands covered the soft swell of her belly that had been preoccupying him so and he slid down to stroke his face across the oddly taut skin, examining the outer edges of the mound with his hands, tasting her flesh. He practically _wallowed_ against it, and looked up, abashed, to see her gazing at him with adoration.

"That's... quite a fetish you've got there," Rìona said, her voice sounding choked. She reached down to caress his face, and he paused, resting his head on her abdomen.

Seeing her reaction, it occurred to him that he had forgotten lately that what he was touching was more than just an object of erotic fascination. Come the summer, she would be a mother, and if Alistair was still a part of her life, this child would be a part of his life as well.

His brother's child.

_Her_ child.

Without intending to do it, he placed a kiss on her belly, and then another on her hand as it cupped the side of his face.

Her eyes shone with moisture as her arms embraced his shoulders, pulling him to her. "I love you, Alistair."

Overcome for a moment, he had to lean against her, burying his face against the mound of the child he would do his best to help her bring into this world and keep safe.

"I love you, too." He whispered it against her skin with all the fervor of a vow. "Maker, I love you!"

It was a long moment before he continued his exploration, sliding still further down her body. Suddenly her sex was before him, all dark curls and a musky aroma that filled his head. It also appeared to be incredibly confusing, all hair and folds of skin with nothing that leaped out and screamed _touch here!_

For Andraste's sake, where was the nub he'd caressed earlier?

"Show me?"

Rìona chuckled softly, but her hand slid obligingly down her body as she spread her thighs wider and began to guide him.

Her fingers pushed the folds apart, and suddenly everything was slick and shiny and pink. Her scent intensified and Alistair thought if he hadn't spent his mad hunger in such a furious rush earlier, surely that aroma would have driven him to it now. Before he knew it he was tasting her and...

"Oh, _Maker's breath!_" he groaned, because she tasted better than she smelled, tangy and smoky and just a hint of sweetness also. He wanted to lap every drop of that flavor from her, wanted to suck it out of her, wanted...

"Here," Rìona's voice reached him when he was on the cusp of diving in and devouring her, guiding and instructing him. "Everything else is pleasant, and a tongue _inside_ can feel amazing. But, if your concern is with giving pleasure, this is where you need to focus your attention, just as you did with your fingers. Firm strokes, unless your intent is merely to tease, increasing the pressure the more intense the pleasure becomes. You'll know by my sounds. Silence means it's time to try something new, or seek guidance, if you prefer. You can draw circles with the tip of your tongue, or figures-eight, or attempt to trace letters and write out the Chant of Light even."

"_Not_ the thought I want to be having in this particular position," Alistair growled, his shoulders shaking with laughter.

Rìona's entire body seemed to shimmy as she giggled. "I didn't say you _had_ to; your name will do just as well. Though, perhaps if the Chantry knew of that particular trick they might change their stance on lewdness and encourage such pursuits. Soon the Maker's name would indeed be sung out from all corners of the earth."

Alistair's head fell against her thigh as he laughed helplessly. "You... are a wicked woman," he gasped breathlessly. "You know, according to the sisters at the monastery, I should be struck by lightning right about now, and here you are tempting fate with your blasphemy!"

"I'll take my chances." Rìona snickered, then hummed as his tongue found that spot and stroked firmly across it. "Mm, at least if that lightning strikes, we'll go to the Fade happy."

Alistair had no response for that, because he suddenly found his mouth very busy. The more enthusiastic he was in his efforts the louder she became. The hands that had caressed his hair now clenched in it and she ground her sex against his mouth.

Alistair was drunk on her flavor and aroma, and the throbbing of his ignored cock was almost an afterthought, because he felt he could do this forever as long as she kept making those sounds. He pushed two fingers inside her and was gratified by her moan of pleasure.

Her cries grew louder, more frantic, more breathless, and when he shoved his fingers in deep and sucked hard on that spot she went rigid, her hips arching, and she _wailed_ his name.

He felt the pulsing and clenching of her muscles, felt the spasms shudder through her. He rested his head on her thigh as she subsided, with small shivers occasionally rippling across her body. In that moment of triumph, he felt like he could have taken on the archdemon and the whole darkspawn horde single-handed and won the battle.

Second to his completely self-satisfied pride by only a very little was the fact that the need he'd been content to ignore before was now suddenly roaring and insistent, filling his head with the demand to be inside her _now._

"Please," he breathed, pushing himself up to meet her glazed eyes. "May I...? I need..."

"_Say it_." Rìona lifted her head and stared at him, her eyes dark and her voice low and rough with something he couldn't name.

"I need to fuck you," he growled, the words rushed with his urgency. That darkness in Rìona's eyes flared into a blaze and suddenly she was in motion.

He didn't know how he ended up on his back, how suddenly she was on top of him, straddling him. He found he didn't much actually care as her mouth came down on his, hungry and demanding. When she broke the kiss and reared up, he pushed eagerly against her, his cock trapped between their bodies. She lifted off him and took him in hand and then she was sliding down onto him, taking him inside.

Maker's breath, how was it possible to forget in such a short amount of time how hot and tight it was inside her, how her muscles clenched and pulled at him as she rose up and down and drove him deeper and deeper inside her body?

His hands rose up to cover her breasts; he pulled on her nipples and her body tightened in response. Remembering her writhing movements earlier, he pinched down hard and, sweet Andraste, the tension of her surrounding him increased, and the undulation of her body above him was indescribable.

He was able to take his time and watch her, watch the way her breasts swayed as she rode him, the way she rolled her hips forward when she settled fully down on him, as though seeking a different sort of pressure than merely that of him filling her. But soon his pulse was roaring in his ears again and his hands were shaking as he pulled on her hips, adding force to drive her down upon him harder while he braced his feet and thrust up to meet her.

She was sweating and panting, her breasts wet and heaving as she worked, her eyes clamped shut with an intent look of concentration on her face. Her hand slid down her round belly and Alistair watched as her fingers circled and rubbed, watched as she brought herself to climax. The sight was unbelievable. Her head fell back and a long, keening moan fell from her lips as she tightened and clenched and shuddered.

Then he was following her, thrusting blindly up into her until the heat and pressure that blossomed and grew at the base of his shaft spilled up into her in spurts so powerful it was nearly agony. Alistair groaned as his body seized and released, holding her hips hard enough to bruise.

When awareness returned, she was a slick, sweaty, overheated mass upon his chest, licking and kissing and sighing with contentment.

"Is it always... like that?" he panted when he regained the power of speech.

"Only if you're very lucky," Rìona chuckled.

"Oh, good," he said with relief. "I'm not entirely sure... too much of that... wouldn't just... kill me."

When she laughed, her muscles clamped and she bounced on his softening cock and it felt almost excruciatingly good, but when she stopped laughing and simply snuggled, it was almost better.

"Then again," he murmured, kissing her, "at least we'll go to the Fade happy, right?"


	40. Chapter Forty: Explorations

"Tell me about Zevran."

Rìona froze in the process of unlacing the abbreviated leather cuirass of her Dalish armor. "I should have known this would come up."

Alistair, she was discovering, had a fixation with knowing about her past lovers. It wasn't jealousy, quite. Well, it was, in that it clearly triggered something aggressive and possessive within him, but it didn't seem to be born out of the sort of lack of trust that jealousy often seemed rooted in. Alistair wasn't jealous, in the sense that he feared Rìona's affection or passion for past lovers would diminish or supplant what she felt for him. He simply had a consuming need to know about her experiences.

It wasn't until he had asked her about Duncan that she also began to understand just how much he _enjoyed_ hearing about what she had done with others.

The results of that particular discovery had been fantastically amorous, as Alistair insisted on re-enacting the night she'd spent with Duncan after leaving Cailan's tent.

"You don't _have_ to tell me." Alistair shrugged, seemingly unconcerned.

"What, and deny myself the pleasure of your perverse sense of possessiveness?"

"You do rather seem to like it when I get possessive," he remarked, stretching out on the bedroll, downright hedonistic in his unabashed nudity. It seemed as though, once the barriers of Alistair's reserve came crashing down, he was utterly without shame. Now that the weather had turned warm with a vengeance—the late spring had been perhaps a week long before the full heat of an early summer beset them—he was only too happy to shed his armor and clothing at the end of the day, when they were alone in Rìona's tent.

And Rìona was only too eager to accommodate him. They were making poor time to Orzammar, pitching camp perhaps earlier than was strictly necessary and rising much later than they should, but she could regret none of it. This time, she would claim for herself, before the burden of duty they bore fell full upon them once more.

"You're an utter brute when you get possessive," she responded with a teasing smile, casting off her breast bindings and settling beside him on the bedroll. "And yes, I enjoy it enormously."

A passionate kiss later, she drew back and hummed thoughtfully. "So, what do you wish to know? Shall I tell you about the time Zevran demanded I service the female captain of a pirate ship? Or perhaps later that evening, when he whipped me with a belt before he made love to me?"

"Whipped you?" Startled, Alistair drew away from her, staring in shock. "Maker's breath! How could he—?"

Rìona stilled his protest, laying her fingers over his lips. "It's not what you assume. I wanted it. Needed it. Just as I enjoy it when you turn brutish, so I enjoyed it when he whipped me. It was... cathartic. And afterward I felt positively blissful."

"I'm not sure I'm quite ready to hear that." Alistair shuddered slightly. If he had any reservations about the pleasures they indulged together, they dealt with Rìona's penchant for the occasional bit of pain. "Maybe some other time. Perhaps when you're no longer with child."

"All right, that's fair enough," Rìona nodded. "Lay back."

"I thought you were going to tell me about Zevran."

"I am." Alistair stared at her cautiously, but lay back as she instructed. He was already hard and rampant, ready for her touch, her mouth. Rìona wanted to climb over him and take him deep inside, but instead, she reached for her pack.

Alistair's eyes lit up as she drizzled oil into her palm and over his shaft. It was delightful to see the discovery of new pleasures through his eyes. Such a simple thing, using lubrication to facilitate stroking him, and yet it had never occurred to Alistair. He had, however, taken readily to the innovation.

Now, his back arched slightly, and his eyes drifted closed as she ran her hand slowly and evenly up and down his length. He pushed up into her caresses and Rìona let herself enjoy watching him for a moment. It was astonishing, how readily Alistair gave himself over to pleasure now. She would never have imagined it possible, before that first afternoon together as they left the Brecilian Forest. She had thought it would take time for him to get comfortable with it all, but he surprised her.

When she replaced her hand with her mouth, taking him deep within, he groaned deeply. His hands came to rest lightly on her hair and he lifted off the bedroll slightly, offering her a better angle.

"The thing to remember about Zevran," she said when she pulled away and resumed stroking with her hand, "is that he enjoys men as well as women, much as my father and Duncan both did. This opens the door to certain pleasures that some men might not automatically consider, though certainly they're by no means exclusive to those who share such preferences."

"Such as?"

She used her free hand to cup his sac, gently kneading. "He has a wooden phallus, carved and polished, in his packs. And there were times when I would use it on him as I pleasured him."

"Oh?" A puzzled frown crossed Alistair's face, and then his eyes widened as her oiled fingers glided gently down from his sac into the crevice between his buttocks and massaged gently. "Oh!"

Rìona took him in her mouth again as she waited for the sudden tension in his body to resolve itself. She waited to see if he would recoil, but instead, with a slight shiver, he relaxed. She felt his shaft grow firmer within her mouth, pulsing rigidly, and pulled away to give him time to come back from the precipice. It wouldn't do to end things too quickly.

For some time, Rìona simply stroked him. She nuzzled his groin and thighs, licking, kissing, nibbling lightly—never pushing, as he grew more pliant under her ministrations.

And while she did so, Alistair asked the question she knew had been plaguing him the whole time. It was a question she had been half-dreading.

"Do you ever wish you were still with him?"

Rìona was silent for a long moment, trying to frame her response without being dishonest. "If you're asking if I would rather be with him than you, the answer is no. Surely you can have no doubt of that."

His eyes were tender as they looked at her. "I don't."

"But?"

"But there's still something there, isn't there?" he pressed. "At least, there is on his part."

Startled, Rìona blinked at him. "I beg your pardon?"

Alistair's mouth tightened, as though he regretted his words. "Never mind," he said quickly.

This was why she had been dreading the subject of Zevran. Unlike the other lovers of her past, Zevran was still very much present with them. The time she had spent with him could not simply be dismissed as mere history. If Alistair chose to perceive that as a threat, it could be disastrous.

"If you're asking if I miss Zevran's company for its own sake, then truthfully I have to admit that I do," Rìona said after a moment, carefully. "He was a wonderful friend and confidante and a thrilling lover. But he would not welcome the burden of a woman with a child, even if I were inclined to ask him to do so. And I had begun to fall in love with you before I ever met him. I have no regrets."

She looked away, for Alistair was giving her a look that felt very much like censure, as though he didn't quite believe her. Rìona couldn't blame him; she wasn't entirely certain she believed herself, anymore. The truth was, she missed Zevran far more than she felt she should, and that lingering sense of something undone continued to plague her, despite how happy she was to be with Alistair. She simply hadn't known Alistair was aware of it.

Zevran was still a friend and confidante, but there was a distance there now. She knew she lied when she claimed not to regret it.

She dismissed those thoughts. They could lead to nothing she cared to pursue. Finally she looked back at him, her voice calm and her eyes serene. "Truly, Alistair, there's nowhere I would rather be than here with you."

"I don't doubt you, love." Like so many of the amazing traits Alistair now exhibited, this security in her affections took her by surprise. How long had he struggled to come to that point and truly make his peace with her past and her proclivities? she wondered.

Alistair reached for her and drew her toward him, kissing her deeply. It was a difficult angle, for she could not lay atop him with her belly in the way and so she had to hover over him. Alistair's heart was in his eyes when she finally drew back up, filled with adoration.

"Show me what you did with Zevran."

And so Rìona poured more oil into her palm and slicked it down her fingers, and began stroking his shaft once more as her other hand slid along his crevice, spreading oil. Alistair watched her intently, and after a moment he bent his knees and braced his feet wide apart on the bedroll to give her better access.

Ever so carefully, she began to press against the knotted ring of his entrance, slowly coaxing it to relax. When her finger began to slip inside, he tensed slightly. His eyes closed as he breathed slowly out.

"That's... odd."

Rìona laughed softly, tightening her fingers around his cock and drawing them firmly down the length of his shaft. His muscles flexed around her finger as he pushed into the caress. This was her favorite time, teaching him something new, watching as he incorporated the discovery into the deeply passionate nature he'd kept buried for so long.

"It gets better," she promised, beginning to move her finger in and out slowly until he relaxed and began to move subtly, inviting more.

She added a second finger gently, watching his face—his beautiful face—as it was overcome by an expression of intense concentration. With his eyes closed, he let himself _feel_ the new sensations, adapting as she rotated her hand back and forth, loosening him.

Alistair was silent, frowning slightly as though waiting for something. She worked her fingers in deeply, turning her hand until her palm was up, and then curled her fingers slightly, seeking.

Alistair's startled groan told her she had found her goal. His eyes flew open. "Maker!"

"As I said..." Rìona murmured, smiling as she bent over and took him into her mouth again.

She brought him to the brink, then, with her fingers within him and her mouth around him. She relished each helpless thrust he made, each quiver, each unconstrained sound. Only when Alistair hovered at the precipice did she move away, slowly withdrawing her fingers.

"And that is what the phallus was for," she concluded, stretching out beside him as he backed down from his climax. Alistair rolled onto his side to take her in his arms, his large hands covering her back as he drew her close. "I would pleasure him with it, and sometimes he would take me with it still inside him, heightening his experience. And sometimes he would use it upon me, and have my sex while the phallus was in my rear, making everything _tighter_ and more intense."

"Sweet Andraste," Alistair muttered as he nibbled upon her earlobe. "I can't even imagine how being inside you could possibly be any tighter or more intense."

"No?" Pulling away, Rìona reached for the vial of oil and placed it in his hands. "Would you like to try?"

Alistair stared at the vial for a moment as if half-afraid it would bite him, then he gave a jerky, eager nod. Laughing again, Rìona rose to her hands and knees, drawing a rolled blanket to her chest to rest upon.

"Maker! The sight of you like this!" Alistair's hands landed upon her backside and kneaded, squeezing and molding her flesh as he gave a low groan. If she'd found his fascination with her breasts amusing, it was nothing compared to his fixation for the curves of her hips and buttocks. Only his fetish for her pregnant belly—and oh, the delight he took in seeing her continue to grow!—outshone it.

"Harder," Rìona urged, wriggling slightly for his benefit. Obligingly, Alistair's hands tightened upon her, until she gasped with discomfort. "The night Zevran whipped me with the belt, he took me this way, so that my skin was welted and sore when he was pressed against me, seated within me. The combination of pain and pleasure was exquisite."

With a low moan, Alistair dragged his blunt fingernails down her buttocks, making her nerve endings sing. When she gasped and squirmed, he did it again, harder, and again, until her skin felt ablaze.

"Perhaps there's something to this whipping idea after all," he chuckled wickedly, caressing the lines he'd made on her flesh lightly. Rìona shivered under the touch. "I love the way you wriggle, and I like the idea of seeing this lovely rump of yours all pink and warm."

"You could always spank me." She wriggled her rear again, gamely.

"Don't tempt me, you minx!" he laughed. "I don't think I'm quite ready for our companions to hear me _beating_ you."

"Hmm, true." Sighing, Rìona lay her cheek on the rolled blanket and murmured, "Perhaps we'll save it, for once we're in Orzammar and have walls around us."

"I'd like that." The fingers of one of his hands slid down from her backside to dip between her thighs, stroking lightly along the folds of her slick cleft. "Andraste's sweet mercy, you're positively dripping!"

"I am!" Rìona gasped as his fingers plunged inside her easily. She arched her back, presenting herself as wantonly as a cat in heat. "Maker, Alistair, I need you inside me!"

"What about this?" He withdrew his fingers to prod carefully at her rear passage, wet with her own moisture.

"Then do it!" she muttered urgently. "But carefully. It can be quite painful, if done improperly. Use plenty of oil, and take your time. I'll tell you when I'm ready for more."

She talked him through it as he prepared her, willing herself to relax as the stretching became more intense. Two fingers gave way to three, twisting within her, spreading the oil and opening her.

She could _feel_ herself dripping, now, each stroke of his fingers within her rear passage prompting more moisture in her channel.

"Now, Alistair. Go slowly."

And then his oiled shaft was pressing into her, and his groan filled her ears. She could feel his trembling restraint as he tried to go slowly. Maker, there was so very much of him to accommodate! There was almost no pain, for she'd been thorough as she talked him through preparing her, but even so it was an effort. The overwhelming sense of _fullness_, of being stretched and opened, was almost more than she could bear.

It was truly exquisite, and made more so by his harsh, ragged breathing above and behind her. His hands gripped her hips without regard for the comfort of his grasp—he was too far gone for that, and she knew his restraint was nearing an end. This was her favorite moment, when he forgot to be gentle, when caution gave way to need. The passion and aggression she had once suspected dwelt within him paled in comparison to the reality that was _Alistair._

With a muttered curse, he pulled back and surged forward again, wrenching a cry from her lips. The sound only urged him on. It was unbearable, it was sublime. It was an ordeal in the most welcome and pleasurable sense. A few strokes of her own fingers and Rìona shuddered, the ripples of her climax almost overshadowed by the intensity of feeling Alistair moving within her—so deep, so full!— as he lost himself. Her muscles rippled around him and Alistair let out a groan, nearly a shout, and drove into her harder.

It wasn't long before his own climax overtook him, and he pulsed deep inside her as he spent. "Dear Maker!" Alistair groaned, panting above her. Rìona breathed a sigh of combined relief and regret as he softened and withdrew.

"Did I hurt you?" he asked breathlessly after a moment, releasing his fierce grip on her hips. Gratefully, Rìona stretched out upon the bedroll, happy to give her knees a break. Alistair sprawled beside her as she went eagerly into his arms.

"No, not at all," she assured him, kissing the sweat-dampened skin of his chest. Then she lifted her head and grinned. "And even if you had, as with so many other things, sometimes a touch of pain adds a little spice to the pleasure. Which is why I like it when you're a brute."

Chuckling, Alistair drew her back down to his chest, and Rìona was content to lie there while his breathing grew slow and even, and his body relaxed against hers. Inevitably, with the weight of the babe against her bladder, a call of nature beckoned and Rìona quickly dressed and left the tent for the privacy of the trees. Conall lifted his head as she passed, but she stroked his ears and murmured a command to go back to sleep, and snuffling, he laid his head upon his paws and obeyed.

When she returned, Zevran was seated beside the campfire, sliding a whetstone along the blade of his dagger. She cursed herself for the sinking feeling she felt, ever so slightly, when she saw him. Alistair's quickly dismissed observation from earlier that evening returned to her, and she wondered what it was he thought he saw, in the way Zevran regarded her, that she didn't. All she could see was the way his eyes quickly bypassed her belly to focus on her face.

He wanted nothing to do with the obligations inherent in dedicating himself to a woman with a child. That much was obvious from the way he had detached himself for her side the moment he was certain she was finally safe from Morrigan's machinations. That he was fond of her was made amply clear by the fact that he had stayed as long as he had, protecting her. But it had been pleasure between them, at her own insistence. Pleasure and friendship. Nothing more.

And she loved Alistair, madly. Sometimes her love for Alistair was so consuming she felt she would be incinerated by it. The peace and wonder she felt in his arms, Rìona wouldn't trade for anything. She wanted to weep at the beauty and joy of it all.

She had absolutely no right to feel any grief at Zevran's choice not to be with her.

So why, then, was there always that pang when she saw him? Just an instant, the briefest frisson of tension, before they each pasted on a smile and pretended it hadn't happened?

"You look well pleased, _Guardiana,_" Zevran offered flirtatiously.

She wished she didn't know him well enough to know how often he used flirtation as a diversionary tactic.

Much as she herself did.

"I am well pleased," she replied with a cat-like smile. Something tightened in his eyes, and he looked away.

Always, he looked away.

Strange, she'd spent so many months wondering if Alistair could accept her as she was, that it never occurred to her to wonder about Zevran having such a problem. Ironic, really, that he—who was so open about everything else—could not cope with the fact that she was with child, while Alistair eagerly embraced that fact, despite his more reserved nature.

"I am happy for you, _querida._" His voice was low, and he would not meet her eyes as he murmured the words. And surely those were the exact words she needed, to get past this plaguing feeling that matters between them lacked resolution.

So why did they feel like the wrong words?

"Thank you," Rìona whispered, and fled into the tent before the encounter got even more unbearably disconcerting.

Within the tent, she curled against Alistair and he stirred sleepily, draping an arm around her and murmuring an inquiry.

"I'm fine." She drew his hand to her face and kissed it, muzzling her cheek into his palm for a moment. She wondered at the burning in her eyes as she repeated her assurance.

"I'm fine."


	41. Chapter Forty One: Tempest

It was Alistair who noticed the oncoming storm first, pointing out the dark line of clouds congregating on the western horizon over Lake Calenhad.

Zevran was talking with Shale toward the rear of the party when he saw the templar look to the west. The casual ease with which he reached out and caught Rìona's bare arm, stopping her mid-stride and pointing out the clouds, was telling. When Zevran had first joined the party, Alistair would have approached her diffidently, hesitantly remarking on the oncoming storm and trying to suggest they stop to make camp without actually being the one responsible for the decision.

Now, however, he simply bent his head toward Rìona's in a moment of murmured conference, and at her nod, issued the order to start looking for a likely spot to make camp, preferably on higher ground with good drainage.

"Is there any chance we can find a cave?" Rìona asked tightly, her eyes darting to that line of clouds again. "Zevran, do you perhaps know of any place? We're not so far from the canyons where you first ambushed us after we left the mage tower, after all."

"There was a cave to the east, but I think it is farther than we have time for." Her mouth drew into a tense line at his answer, and Zevran saw her shudder as she looked at the clouds once more.

"What about the Spoiled Princess?" This, she posed to Alistair, who shook his head. "Or perhaps a freehold where we might beg shelter in a barn?"

"We're half a day from Kinloch Hold. We'd be caught out in the open if we tried it. I'd say we've got two, maybe three hours before that storm's upon us. It's moving fast over the lake." The templar, too, began to pick up on her tension, his eyes narrowing as he looked down at her. "Is there a problem?"

She shook her head quickly—too quickly. There was absolutely nothing genuine in the closed-lip smile she offered him. "No, of course not. I'm simply dreading the prospect of trying to dry all our gear and bedding out."

The distraction worked.

"Hm, that's a good point." Alistair frowned, considering the problem. "We don't want our leather gear getting wet, in particular. Maybe we can use the oiled cloth of my now-unused tent to wrap up our armor and weapons. Or maybe Wynne has a spell that can keep the rain off a small area?"

"By all means, look into that." Rìona gave him a jerky nod and walked away quickly.

If Zevran needed any more proof that something was deeply amiss, it was the fact that she was so eager to hand off the entire responsibility of preparing their party for the storm to her templar. She involved herself very little, instead casting furtive glances to the west again and again, her hands clenching and unclenching as she paced restlessly.

The wind was beginning to pick up by the time their tents were erected, on the east side of a low bluff which would hopefully provide a bit more shelter from the driving rain coming out of the west. The ground they had chosen turned out to be quite hard—which bode well for its drainage—and Shale had to carefully stomp the pegs into the ground to hasten the process along. Zevran was amused by the haste with which they all removed their armor. Wynne had managed to do Alistair's suggestion one better, creating a ward that sustained a variant of a force field spell, which would surround the sack holding their armor so that a tent need not be used to bundle it. The heavy bundle would rest upon a cairn of hastily gathered stones so that no water would gather underneath it. They could not afford for their leathers to stiffen and their plate armor to begin to rust.

Unfortunately, Wynne could only create one such ward, so it was not possible to protect their entire camp from the rain. Instead, Sten offered to give up his own tent for the night—sleeping in Zevran's tent while Zevran was on watch and then trading off—and Wynne and Leliana would share as well, which meant they could fold the oiled canvas of three unoccupied tents on the ground in the bottom of the remaining three, and thus protect their blankets and bedrolls from becoming wet and mildewy.

Alistair grinned at the first low rumble of thunder, as the last of their preparations were completed. "Maker, I love summer storms!" he remarked to nobody in particular as they all scrambled to erect the last of the tents. Like Zevran and the rest of their party, he was dressed only in linen shirt and breeches. Anything which couldn't be easily dried was stuffed into the tents or under Wynne's ward. It hardly mattered, though. Between the rushed labor and the sweltering heat of the unseasonably warm spring, they were all half-drenched with sweat.

"When I used to sleep in the stables at Redcliffe, I always loved lying in the hayloft listening to the rain on the roof right overhead. And that _smell_ when the rain first starts!"

Zevran nodded. "We have some truly impressive storms which blow in off the Rialto Bay in Antiva City. The thunder outside shook the walls so hard it felt the building would collapse. It was an excellent time for slipping away unnoticed and causing mischief that the other apprentices would be hard-pressed to explain."

"I always wanted to be outside during a storm," Alistair remarked wistfully at the next roll of thunder in the distance. "I made the mistake of saying so to the stable-master once and he said he'd box my ears if I tried it. I wonder if Rìona—"

Zevran shook his head, "I suspect she does not favor such storms as you and I do, my friend," he said, grinning as he attempted to envision what precisely the templar had imagined for an instant. Lying their sweet Warden out in the tall, wet grasses, stripping away her sodden clothing as the rain pelted his back...

It was a good fantasy.

And one in which Zevran had no place.

It would be easier to be morose about it, if he weren't so genuinely pleased for them both. Rìona, he had expected to be pleased for, but it surprised Zevran to realize just how amusing the templar was when he was strutting about like a proud cock—which, despite Zevran's teasing, was an apt description, judging by the sounds that emerged from the Warden's tent at night.

"Oh, well, probably just as well," Alistair said mournfully. "The stable-master always said if I tried it, I'd catch my death of lung-fever—oh, Maker's balls!"

Zevran blinked, startled by the unexpected oath, as Alistair practically tossed his bedroll into his tent. "Leliana, have you seen Rìona?" he called, jogging toward the bard's tent.

"She said she was going into the woods to gather some firewood, before it got too wet to do us any good once the storm had passed. Why?"

"We'd better find her and get her back to camp before the storm hits."

"The storm! Andraste's mercy, you're right!"

Zevran fell in step with them as they started for the nearby patch of woods, noticing the concerned looks they gave one another as thunder rumbled, louder than it had been before, and the sky continued to darken.

"What is it?" He demanded.

"Did Rìona ever tell you about her twin brother?" Alistair asked tersely.

"Of course."

"Did she mention _why_ Aodhán wouldn't leave her side, that day she fell and broke her leg?"

The pieces fell into place, and Zevran cursed.

Seeing comprehension dawn, Alistair nodded grimly. "Suddenly her behavior this afternoon makes much more sense."

They split up, rushing through the brush in different directions. Zevran struggled with a mounting sense of urgency as the loud patter of heavy raindrops began to fall on the leafy canopy overhead. He tried to force himself to calmness, to impassivity. They'd had a child like her among the Crow apprentices, once. A human boy who had only been around a few weeks when one of the terrible storms had swept in over the Rialto Bay. When he began shrieking in panic, one of the older apprentices had slit his throat. There was no room in the Crows for someone who couldn't keep his head in the face of a little rain.

He tried not to think of what _she_ must be feeling, alone out here, as the thunder ceased to be a low rumble and instead became a crash.

He lost that battle when he stumbled over her discarded armful of firewood.

In his mind, he saw her, frozen with terror as the thunder boomed around her, dropping the wood she'd been hastening to gather amidst her mounting panic from hands suddenly gone numb with fear. When the thunder passed, she fled, but... not toward camp, exposed to the open sky there the clouds roiled and the lightning flashed.

Where, then?

West, he decided, setting off in that direction. Toward the low bluffs against which this stand of woods butted, much as their camp did. She wanted a cave, something solid to hide within, and that was her best chance of finding one.

The rain became a downpour that drained through the canopy in strange drizzles and diverted streams. A sudden crack of thunder sounded like the very wrath of the Maker snapping the trunks of the trees, and it was followed mere seconds later by lightning, which illuminated the shadows between the trees in a second of strange blue-white light. In the distance, he thought he could hear Alistair and Leliana calling her name, but it was hard to tell over the sound of the rain.

Zevran didn't bother to call; he simply ran.

When he reached the wall of bluffs at the western edge of the wooded stand, he ran along it, seeking whatever cave she had sought and praying she hadn't found it already inhabited by a bear.

In the end, it wasn't a cave she found, after all. It was a hollow, little more than a nook, barely sheltered by a rocky outcropping that overhung the ledge above the hollow. Rìona was curled in a ball and pressed as tightly against the stone as she could manage. Her wet linen shirt clung to her skin, nearly transparent, and Zevran imagined he could see her shivering, despite the warmth of the day.

The next crash of thunder was accompanied by the shrill descant of her scream, and when the lightning flashed on its heels, he saw her eyes, wide and bulging with terror. Her hair stuck in serpentine tendrils to her pale, harrowed face.

There was no room for restraint, no room for withholding, in the face of her fear. Instead, Zevran rushed to her, curled over her, made of his body another barricade between her and the storm and sheltered her. Rìona's arms locked around him, seizing him with a fierce, desperate strength as she croaked his name.

"Shh, I'm here, _mi corazón_, I'm here."

He suspected the sudden vulnerable feeling creeping up his spine and tightening his shoulders had nothing to do with the fact that his back was exposed and unguarded. Yet that feeling did nothing to stop the incautious torrent of soothing murmurs which poured from his lips in his native tongue.

_"Estoy aquí, mi dulce. A ti te tengo. Estás a salvo, mi ciela, mi amor. Nada puede hacerte daño. Estoy aquí. No voy a dejarte sólo." (1)_

He knew she could understand; he simply prayed she wasn't actually listening.

How long they huddled there, he had no way of knowing. Long enough for his knees to begin to ache with the effort of crouching there. Long enough for the explosive crashes of thunder to begin to move away to the east, and the rain drumming through the leaves and streaming in rivulets down the rock face of the bluff to taper off into a heavy drizzle.

Somehow, they shifted, so that Zevran sat upon the bed of rotten leaves that covered the ground, and Rìona curled against him, still clutching him desperately, her face buried against his chest. Each time the thunder rolled, her body tensed and shuddered, and she clung to him more tightly; he had no hope of convincing her to move until it was truly gone.

And so he held her and waited, and tried to pretend the brush of his lips on her sodden hair was accidental as he continued to murmur reassurances.

When the thunder was but the faintest rumble from the east, Zevran felt movement beneath his hand. He lifted his head and straightened, thinking she intended to rise, only to realize that his hand was resting at the side of her swelling abdomen, and the motion he had felt hadn't been Rìona at all.

He jerked his hand away as though burned, and she quickly withdrew from him.

"I'm sorry," she muttered self-consciously, prompting Zevran's utter sense of bewilderment.

"For what?"

"I know the thought of my being with child makes you... uncomfortable." Rìona lifted her chin, looking at once pride-stung and stubborn. "I understand. I don't... fault you for it."

Insulted, Zevran stiffened. "_This_ is what you have been assuming of me?"

As soon as the words were spoken, he wished he could retract them. Yes, better to let her think that. Better to let her believe him repulsed by her pregnancy, than to burden her with the knowledge of his feelings, or to try to explain that he had nothing to offer a woman with a child. He was a man who lived in the present, taking his pleasures where they came and never thinking of the future. But Rìona... she had no choice but to look to her future, to the babe which she must nurture and protect. Zevran could envision no place for himself in that scenario. And even if he were the sort to think such things, he was still an elf. Her babe must have a name and to offer her his would bestow no less stigma than if she bore a bastard.

Her templar was only too happy to step in. Moreover, Zevran had no doubt Alistair would fill the gap admirably. He had seen the pride Alistair took in watching Rìona's belly swell more with each passing week; no one who didn't already know would ever guess it wasn't the templar's child she carried. He had seen the way Alistair's hands came up to cup her belly as he embraced her from behind, holding them both, protectively.

When Zevran could make himself look at it philosophically, he actually found it quite lovely.

He wanted to resent the templar, and instead he found himself rooting for him. Zevran had no wish to hurt him. Somewhere along the lines, Alistair's happiness had come to matter, as well as Rìona's. Especially in light of the fact that the Alistair was being so respectful of Zevran's lingering... affections... for their sweet Warden, rather than resenting them or treating it as cause for a feud.

He couldn't explain that all to her. He had no words for it, no way to make her understand what he himself could barely comprehend.

Instead, as he had done that night they had confronted Morrigan over her betrayal, he kissed her. Hard, fiercely, driven by his frustration at his inability to put into words these concepts of which he had no understanding, these complications that had somehow arisen from their uncomplicated pleasures.

Rìona stiffened in shock for a moment... and then she melted against him, her hands curling around the back of his neck. Ah! But it was wrong, so very wrong. He had no desire to interfere in her happiness with the templar, no wish to hurt either of them. This was only making it all worse.

And so he made himself pull away and release her. Her face was filled with longing and horror at the realization of what she had done. And that was worse, still. Bad enough that Zevran should have to deal with his own... _confusion_... thinking she felt nothing of the sort for him. So much worse, though, to realize that she, too, was... _confused_.

She loved the templar, of that he had no doubt.

But she felt for Zevran more... _confusion_... than could be accounted for by mere lust.

Zevran wanted to laugh, bitterly, at the fates which had constructed this convoluted trap for them all.

He felt the prickle up the back of his neck that told him someone was behind him an instant before Rìona's expression changed. Ah, no! She gave too much away with her eyes. She appeared guilty, and afraid, as she looked over Zevran's shoulder and saw her beloved standing there.

Any hope Zevran might have held out that Alistair would not grasp that something was out of place was quickly banished. In the past, the templar might have raged. Now, instead, his voice was tense, but calm. Far too calm.

"Good. You found her." And this was how Zevran knew Alistair was battling with his own rage. There was no relief, no joy at seeing her well. Simply that tight, empty calm.

"Thank you, Zevran, for helping me," Rìona murmured, subdued. Her expression of guilt was gone, however. Instead, her chin was lifted and her expression determined. She was bracing herself for a confrontation. "I'll return to camp with Alistair. Go on ahead without us."

Faced with an impossible situation, Zevran did the only thing he could do. He nodded his acquiescence, walked away through the trees, and then once he was out of sight, slipped into the shadows and doubled back.

"Alistair—" he heard Rìona say softly, and as he peered out from behind a tree, he saw Alistair give a brusque shake of his head.

"You _are_ all right?" Now there was a note of concern in the templar's voice, and Zevran relaxed a little to hear it.

"Yes, of course, I'm fine. I just... panicked. I didn't expect to be caught out like that. Such a ridiculous, childish fear I've never been able to overcome, really," she babbled nervously.

He laughed, bitterly. "This... isn't exactly the way I fantasized about riding out the storm."

"Alistair—" she began again, but again he shook his head, sharply.

"Look, you're better on your feet in an argument than me and you always will be. Can you at least give me some time to... get my thoughts together, before we talk about this?"

"_Are_ we going to argue?"

"I really couldn't say right now. I just need some time to think."

Zevran left before he could hear any more. 

* * *

The rain had tapered off to an almost pleasant drizzle by the time everyone was back at camp, retiring to their tents. Zevran found himself unable to sleep and so he relieved Sten of watch duty and spent his night pacing restlessly around the perimeter of the camp.

For the first time since joining Rìona and her company, he felt caged. Penned in. He had become used to feeling this way in Antiva. Now, it was strange and uncomfortable.

Perhaps it was time to move on.

He and Rìona said nothing to each other whenever she left her tent to relieve herself and then returned, which she did several times a night these days. The rain had ceased entirely and the stars were beginning to appear through the breaking clouds when Alistair—at least he hadn't done anything petty and childish, like refuse to sleep in her tent tonight—emerged from the tent he shared with her, shirtless in the humidity that had descended in the wake of the storm.

Zevran met the templar's eyes warily, his fingers twitching as though they wished to reach for his daggers.

"Unable to sleep?" he asked calmly instead, crossing his arms over his chest.

"Yeah, something like that," Alistair muttered.

"I want you to know—" Zevran began, but Alistair quickly shook his head, raising a forestalling hand.

"If we're going to discuss this, let's step away from camp, so we're not overheard. Shale can keep watch alone for a while."

Zevran gave a brisk nod of acquiescence, wondering at the templar's mood. He was tense, but didn't seem particularly enraged.

When they had gained a bit of privacy, Zevran began again. "I want you to know that what happened today was not deliberate. She was terrified. She would have clung to anyone at that moment. If this Arl Howe, whom she despises so much, had been there, she would have clung to him!" His voice was rising, his calm slipping. Irritated with himself, Zevran pulled it back.

"You think I don't know that?" Alistair demanded.

"I cannot say what you know or do not know, my friend. I can only say it would be very wrong of you to hold her to blame for it."

Alistair looked away, his jaw flexing.

"I know what she looks like when she's just been kissed."

Sighing, Zevran dropped his gaze. "Yes, well. That was entirely my fault. I apologize. It will not happen again. Do not blame her for it."

"Are you— Are you under the impression that I'm _angry_ with her about this?"

"Are you not?" Zevran asked implacably.

"No. I—Maker!" With a low growl, Alistair began to pace. "I'm angry, yes, all right? But not at her. And not even at you. I knew you still... cared for her. I just didn't understand the extent to which she returned those feelings until today."

A denial sprang quickly to Zevran's lips, but he crushed it. It would be a lie, to deny what the templar had said. "Perhaps, but it is of no matter. _You_ are the one she wishes to be with."

"Yes, so she says." That bitter note was back in Alistair's voice. "And so you say. And so _everyone_ says... except for her eyes, when I saw her look at you today. This just... this isn't how it's supposed to be." When the templar met Zevran's eyes, there was something anguished and disillusioned in his gaze.

"You meet a nice girl, you get married—maybe even fall in love—settle down, have a wagon-load of children. That's how it's supposed to be, right?" He scoffed. "That's what the I was always led to believe, at least. That's what the Chantry says the Maker's plan is for us all. So tell me, how should I react? I don't even know anymore."

"What is this 'supposed to be?'" Zevran demanded. "We live in the world as it exists, not as it is _supposed_ to be! The Blight may consume us all tomorrow, or we may find ourselves hanging on your Loghain's gallows, or overwhelmed by the wrath of the Crows. There is no room in your life for fairy tales!"

"I know. I thought I was prepared for that." Alistair stopped his pacing, his arms falling uselessly to his sides. "I want to be angry, and I can't. That's the damnable part of it. I went into this knowing exactly who and what Rìona was. I knew there were no guarantees and I was determined to accept whatever the moment delivered and all being with her might entail. It's just... harder, when confronted with the reality of it."

Zevran didn't know how to answer that. He could think of only one way to make this better, one way to avoid creating more difficulty for these two _innocents_ he had somehow come to be so... concerned with.

"I think... perhaps it is time I depart your company."

_"What?"_ The templar yelped in astonishment.

"Keep your voice down!" Zevran hissed. "I have no desire to come between the two of you. But I think now I also have no desire to see every day what I cannot have. And I think you are not the sort of man who would consider sharing his love with another. So I see no other way. I will simply have to take my chances with the Crows."

Zevran watched, forcing himself to cold impassivity, as Alistair weighed the matter. And then the templar set his jaw stubbornly. "No."

"It is the only way—"

"No. _No._" Alistair scowled at him. "Take a moment to imagine how she would feel, knowing this drove you away. Do you think she could be happy with me, after that?"

"She will be hurt at first, it's true. But I think she will understand, in time."

"Maybe. But we've already lost one ally. Morrigan's leaving hurt us. It left us weaker. We can't afford to lose another."

"Surely _you_ do not intend to invoke my oath—!"

Alistair shook his head. "No. Rìona has already made it clear she won't hold you to that if you wish to leave. But she needs you, Zevran." He swallowed hard. "_We_ need you."

The sincerity on the templar's face hurt. Like their sweet Warden's trust, it cut to the quick. Zevran had no defense against it.

It was troubling, to discover it was not only Rìona to whom he had a vulnerability. And yet he was powerless to resist the plea.

"As you wish. I will stay, then, for as long as I can bear it. I can promise no more."

Alistair gave a jerky nod, suddenly withdrawn, as though he feared he had said too much. "That'll do."

Subdued, they made their way back to camp, and Zevran resumed pacing the perimeter as Alistair returned to the tent he shared with their Warden. He heard Rìona's sleepy inquiry and the templar's murmured reassurance, and then nothing.

He wondered just how long he'd be able to endure it.

(1) "I'm here, my sweet. I have you. You're safe, my darling, my love. Nothing can harm you. I'm here. I'm not going to leave you alone."


	42. Chapter Forty Two: Limitations

Rìona glared at Alistair.

"_Absolutely not!_"

"Why not?"

"I will not risk our people, for the sake of entertaining bored dwarves, by participating in a blood sport."

Alistair crossed his arms over his chest, leaning against the wall of the common room of the suite they had rented in a boarding house off the trade district in Orzammar. The establishment catered to surface folk with business in Orzammar and thus had beds long enough for her people to sleep in comfortably. Rìona glanced around at their companions, who were very studiously _not_ watching her and Alistair argue.

They'd been doing that a lot since they'd arrived in Orzammar.

"So, what? We're going to deliver those forged letters and besmirch an innocent man's reputation, instead?"

"How do _you_ know Harrowmont is innocent? Prince Bhelen's supporters suspect Harrowmont may have poisoned the late king, Endrin."

"You mean the same supporters who forge letters and blackmail men into refusing to fight in tournaments?" Alistair scoffed.

"It's not a tournament, it's a _blood sport,_" Rìona grated. "I have no objection to contests of skills at arms, and I recognize as well as anyone that sometimes those contests can be dangerous. But at least on the surface we try to prevent them from being deadly, whereas life here in Orzammar is held so cheaply they can measure entertainment in terms of _decapitations,_ for Andraste's sake! And Harrowmont wants _our people_ to be a party to that. I won't have it!"

"Bhelen's man, Vartag Gavorn, is _slimy,_ Rìona. You know it. You're the one who insisted on taking those deeds to the Shaperate to see if they were forgeries. He's slimy and he _lied_ to us. Why are you so determined to support a candidate who would leave his affairs in the hands of someone like that?"

"You've heard what people are saying about Prince Bhelen, Alistair," Rìona argued. "He's a reformer. He wants to open trade with the surface, improve the lot of the casteless. His own consort was casteless, in fact, until she bore him a son. Do you think Harrowmont cares about the injustice of the way the less fortunate are treated here in Orzammar? Or is he so determined to uphold 'traditional' dwarven values that he'd rather let dwarven birthrates continue to dwindle while babes just out of the womb are thrown into rivers of molten rock for being born to the wrong caste?"

"Maybe you have a point, but we're not here to be social reformers." At least Alistair had the grace to look discomfited by the horrifyingly brutal stratification of society amongst the dwarves. "I agree, it's awful. But we're here to gather our army and that's it. This can't be about what you—or I—would want for your babe."

Rìona drew back in outrage. "Don't you _dare_ imply that my being pregnant is making me incapable of seeing reason in this matter! I'll tolerate that sort of condescension from a hidebound old bronto like Dulin Forender, but I most certainly will not take it from _you._"

"That's not what I'm saying, love," Alistair said gently. "I'm saying that, from the moment Forender made it clear he was uncomfortable asking for your aid on Harrowmont's behalf because of your pregnancy, you've been completely unwilling to consider that Harrowmont might be the better candidate, or at least the more honorable one. He stung your pride, and now you're looking for reasons to justify supporting Bhelen despite the fact that he—or at least his second—is unquestionably dirty."

Rìona sighed, sitting heavily on a sofa to ease the aching in her back. This last week it seemed the babe's weight was starting to become a strain, pulling on her spine until standing too long was uncomfortable and walking long distances was downright painful. Dulin Forender's initial plan had clearly been to ask Rìona, as the Grey Warden leader, to fight in the Proving, but clearly that had been out of the question. Now he wanted her to send one of her other party members, preferably Alistair, the other Grey Warden.

"I can't do this if I'm going to be dismissed as unfit by the people whom I'm supposed to be convincing to entrust their armies to me, Alistair," she said finally. "Who's to say this Harrowmont won't decide I'm not competent to lead his troops, once we've done his bidding and helped him win the throne?"

"What's to keep Bhelen from doing the same thing?" Alistair shot back. "At least Harrowmont's man is forthcoming enough to be upfront about his misgivings. Honestly, he's far from the first dwarf to look at you sidewise once they realize you're still fighting darkspawn this far along."

"I know!" Rìona snapped. "It's their bloody low birthrates. These people see nothing wrong with discarding children once they're born the same sex as the wrong parent, but until that moment, any pregnant woman is bearing a potentially valuable commodity. Once the babe quickens, the mother is coddled and sheltered. Even the casteless women are treated gently, if they might be bearing the babe of man with a caste."

"Let's be fair." Alistair sat beside her on the sofa, his hand rubbing her shoulder. "It's not just the dwarves, or at least it won't be once we reach the surface again. The elves didn't seem to care, but what about when we get back to Redcliffe? You think our own people are going to be any less put off by it?"

"No, I imagine not," she sighed. "Father told me that plenty of women fought in the rebellion while with child, but they were assigned to support roles—caring for the wounded, or managing supply chains—once their bellies began to swell. I can only imagine what Arl Eamon will have to say once he learns I've been fighting this way. I had just... hoped for more time to do everything I have to do. But it's time for me to let go of the reins, isn't it?"

"Not necessarily." Alistair offered her a crooked smile. "You just need to _look_ like you've let go of the reins. We can't avoid combat, not with what we're trying to do. We just need to... not advertise that you're with us when we're fighting. As for the decision-making... I could make a pretty convincing figurehead, I think."

"That's hardly fair to you, Alistair." Rìona frowned. "No, if you're going be our leader, you need to truly lead us, not merely act as my mouthpiece."

Alistair looked as though he wanted to argue, but then he sighed and nodded. "I guess you're right. That doesn't mean I can't confer with you, though, just as you've done with me since the Brecilian Forest. We're still doing this together, right?"

"Right." She gave him a reluctant smile. "I suppose this means you get your way, then. We're supporting Harrowmont?"

Alistair grimaced. "I guess we are. Honestly, love, you make a good point about his plans for the casteless and trade with the surface. It's... tempting to support him for that alone. But..."

"What?"

"There's talk that he wants to centralize power, grab more for the crown and weaken the Assembly of Deshyrs. Wouldn't that make us hypocrites, if we supported him while opposing Loghain for trying the same thing to the bannorn, overruling the Landsmeet?"

"Perhaps you're right," Rìona acknowledged, impressed by the observation. "Though I would caution you against trying too hard to apply surface sensibilities to dwarven politics."

"I'll keep that in mind." Alistair bowed his head and drew a deep breath. Rìona knew that gesture well, by now. It was Alistair bracing himself. When he looked up again, his expression was resolute. "Shale?"

The golem rumbled forth, making the walls vibrate. "It wishes something from me?"

Alistair grinned at her. "How would you like to squish some dwarves?"

"Hm. Interesting. It must tell me more."

"Yes," Rìona said, staring at him in astonishment. "It must."

His grin broadened. "If we're going to declare our support for Harrowmont, let's do it in a way that will truly impress the dwarves. They lost their golem army centuries ago. The fact that we have one on our side has to count for something, right? So let's have Shale fight in the Proving and declare our support for Harrowmont. In addition, there's less chance Shale will be injured—er, damaged—than there would be with the rest of us, minimizing the risk to our people."

Rìona began to smile and impulsively grabbed his shirtfront and dragged him forward into a short, hard kiss, by the end of which Alistair was blushing and stammering.

"What was that for?"

"I think, my love, you're going to do just fine, leading us." 

* * *

"Are you uncomfortable?"

Rìona paused mid-roll, seeking a more tolerable position for her aching back.

"Am I disturbing you?" she asked.

"No, I was still awake. But you're awfully wriggly tonight."

Rìona sighed. "The larger I get, the more difficult it becomes to find a position that doesn't ache. How am I supposed to endure another three months or more of this?"

"Have you spoken to Wynne about it? Perhaps she has a potion..."

"She gave me an unguent to have you massage into my back."

"Oh? Why haven't you mentioned it before?"

"You've been rather immersed in dwarven politics lately. We both have," she said with a shrug, grateful for the absolute dark of their room in Orzammar, with no betraying moonlight filtering in through a window to give away any glimpse of her face. There was no need to admit to him that he was not the first person whose hands she thought of when Wynne mentioned massage.

Andraste's mercy, but it had been easier not to think about Zevran when she had believed Zevran no longer wanted her. Now she felt as though each day she was walking a precarious ledge, always in danger of taking a wrong step and falling.

The day following the storm, she had tried to speak to Alistair about what had happened. But he had simply kissed her, sweetly.

"I trust you," was all he would say on the subject.

That made it worse. She wasn't lying to Alistair or betraying him, and yet she felt guilty. He wasn't like Zevran, who cared little for exclusivity. Nor was he like her father, who enjoyed seeing his wife in the arms of another man. Alistair would see the fact that Rìona couldn't put thoughts of Zevran from her mind as a betrayal, an indication that she loved him _less._

She didn't. Each day, waking beside him, working beside him, her heart was so full of joy, she thought she wouldn't be able to contain herself. His passion, his sweetness, his solidity and _goodness_ were treasures to her. She couldn't bear the thought of hurting him.

And yet she was hurting Zevran; she understood that now. And that was every bit as intolerable as the thought of hurting Alistair.

They were trapped, and no matter how the situation came out, it was bound for misery.

But then Alistair was touching her, kneading and stroking.

"You honestly believe I'd rather think about politics than have my hands upon you?" he growled in her ear, pressing his body close to hers as his hand engulfed her breast.

Maker, it was sweet, the joy of being with him! Never in all her study of pleasure had she imagined it could be like this. She'd never dreamed she could love someone so much that she needed his touch like she needed her next breath, or that a kiss could be as essential as water.

The idea of a massage was quickly forgotten—but then, so was her discomfort. Alistair lay beside her, staring in rapt wonder at her face between adoring kisses as he brought her to climax with questing fingers. When the waves of pleasure broke over her, Rìona wept with the beauty of it.

"What's wrong, love?" he asked softly, kissing the trail a tear had left as it slid down her temple.

_I'm afraid!_ her soul cried out, even as she smiled tremulously and whispered, "I love you."

She'd sworn to herself, when Alistair proposed to court her, that she would take what time of grace was allotted her and be thankful for it, never questioning. Oh, but sweet Andraste, she wasn't ready for it to come to an end just yet.

With Alistair's concerned gaze upon her, she forced herself to push the fear aside. She kissed him and rolled him onto his back, rising up above him to take him inside her. His hands came to rest just over her hips, helping her move. Rìona watched his face as pleasure overtook him, watching him gasp and strain and finally succumb.

She committed him to memory and later, as he lay asleep behind her with his hand still on her belly—he'd fallen asleep feeling for the babe to move—she wondered when it all must end. 

* * *

Pain. Everything was _pain_.

Holding her straight-backed, open-footed posture hurt. Keeping her arms extended hurt. Drawing back her bowstring sent bolts of numbing electricity shooting down from her buttock almost to her knee. Her leg had buckled twice already this morning; a flash of pain running down her thigh and then suddenly her knee gave out. She was desperately afraid it was going to happen again, and that Jarvia and her thugs would gain the upper hand.

She hadn't realized it would be like this. They hadn't had to do close-quarters combat since the elven ruins in the Brecilian Forest, over a month ago. Her agility was more hampered, now, her ability to slip into the shadows and escape notice encumbered. And the physical strain of slowly clearing out the caverns, room by room, was simply agony.

Maker help her, how could she possibly continue to do what she must, like this?

While she stood near the back wall with her bow and attempted to make less of a target of herself, Zevran worked frantically to disarm the traps the carta had laid. Suddenly one of the dwarven miscreants charged Rìona, his dagger flashing toward her exposed abdomen, and she just barely managed to repel him with a jab to the throat with the end of her bow. One of Leliana's arrows pierced him and he was suddenly encased in ice from Wynne's spell. A mighty swing of Sten's sword and the dwarf shattered.

The traps were disarmed, Alistair and Zevran and Shale advanced on Jarvia and her cadre of associates, and the dwarves were falling before them. When Jarvia finally gurgled out her last breaths on the floor of the cavern, Rìona slumped back against the stone wall and dropped her bow. A second later, another bolt of lightning shot down her leg and it once again refused to bear any weight.

"Maker's breath!" she heard Leliana gasp, and looked up to see the bard running toward her. At first, she thought Leliana had noticed her nearly topple over until her leg would support her again, but instead, Leliana's eyes were wide and horrified and staring at Rìona's belly.

Rìona glanced down and wished she hadn't. Blood was running in rivulets down her swollen abdomen, nearly coating her bare skin in a cascading sheet of scarlet. A humming began in her ears, and her fingertips felt numb. A cold sweat prickled her skin, and then the room went dark.

She roused with Alistair hovering over her and realized he'd pulled her into his lap. Leliana's pale, anxious face was beyond him, and Wynne was crouching at her side. She could feel the cool tingling of a rejuvenation spell still lingering, but Wynne's ministrations now were purely non-magical as she wiped Rìona's belly with a damp cloth.

She murmured, "It's hardly more than a scratch. It just looked frightening."

"Thank the Maker!" Alistair breathed in unison with Leliana. She thought she may have even heard some Antivan invocation being muttered from somewhere beyond her line of sight. Shale gave an impatient rumble, and Sten growled.

"That armor is useless as protection," he remarked, not for the first time.

"It's not, actually. I don't know how the Dalish managed it, but the leather is incredibly resilient to most slicing and piercing attacks and protects my heart rather nicely, but as for the rest of me... I wonder if pregnant Dalish women simply avoid combat?" Rìona sighed, trying to push herself up, but Wynne shoved at her shoulder and commanded Alistair to keep her still.

"I can't believe I passed out over a scratch," she muttered, her face burning.

"In fairness, it was an incredibly terrifying scratch," Alistair pointed out reassuringly. "_I_ nearly passed out from the sight of it. It looked like you'd been eviscerated, not to mention the idea that something may have happened to the babe."

Rìona nodded, closing her eyes so the others didn't see the sudden tears that were burning. Maybe in the privacy of their bed some night she'd tell Alistair about that sickening surge of terror as the thought that her babe might have been injured. But she couldn't let the rest of their party see it, even if she wasn't technically their leader any longer.

"Maker, what am I going to do? I can't stop and I can't keep on!" Rìona snorted in disgust. "This is all so... bloody inconvenient. We shouldn't have to jump through hoops to get everyone to fulfill their damned treaties. Maybe we might have had time, if only we hadn't taken so long in the Brecilian Forest, or lingered in Denerim as long as we had, or..."

"There's no sense thinking like that." Alistair stroked a stray lock of hair that had escaped her queue back from her face. "We've done what we've had to do. There are many more months left to this Blight, I'm certain. The archdemon hasn't even appeared on the surface yet. We'll get Harrowmont his crown, then get you back to Redcliffe so you can have this babe, and then we'll end this thing, together."

"How are you feeling otherwise?" Wynne asked in that mild, clinical tone she used when healing their injuries. Rìona hissed as she began rubbing a salve on the cut.

"I think something is wrong with my back, or maybe my leg," Rìona said, describing the pain and weakness she had been feeling, as well as the sudden and unpredictable failure of her leg to support her.

Wynne nodded. "A fairly common complaint for women in the latter part of their pregnancy," she said sagely. "Hopefully the babe will move soon and it will pass. I would advise you to rest, but..." the mage shrugged helplessly and Rìona shook her head.

"Is there anything you can do?" she asked plaintively.

"I'll brew a potion to help with the pain, but there's nothing I can do for the sudden weakness in your leg; that's going to keep happening until the babe moves." Wynne frowned. "Back massage may help as well with the discomfort, and may urge the babe to move also. You still have the unguent I gave you?"

"I do. Thank you, Wynne. Help me up," she urged Alistair. "Let's go, so you can report back to Lord Harrowmont."


	43. Chapter Forty Three: Lines

It was Dulin Forender who greeted Alistair at the entrance of the Harrowmont estate.

"Lord Harrowmont would like to thank you for your efforts in eradicating the menace of Jarvia and her carta, Grey Warden. Unfortunately, he will not be available to meet with you and will no longer require your services."

"I beg your pardon?" Stunned, Alistair stared at the man. "Has there been some change in the political equation, then? Is Lord Harrowmont soon to claim his throne, so that he can fulfill his pledge and give us the troops our treaty calls upon Orzammar to give?"

Forender glanced away, shifting uncomfortably. "I'm afraid it may still be some time before the Assembly declares a king, Grey Warden. But there is nothing further you or your company may do to aid us in this matter."

"That was not the bargain we made with Harrowmont. The deal was, we help him win the throne, he gives us our troops!" Alistair heard his voice rising with impatience and struggled to rein it in. At his shoulder, he felt Leliana's presence, though she held her silence. He thought of Rìona and how _she_ would react, the calm, cool reasoning she would apply. He had to strive for that same sort of tone; flying off the handle wouldn't win him anything.

Maker, but he wished she had been well enough to come with him to this meeting.

"Lord Harrowmont still fully intends to fulfill Orzammar's treaty obligations, when he wins his throne," Forender replied calmly. "But at this point, it would give the people of Orzammar—and the Assembly—a bad impression if we continued to put you and your fellow Grey Warden to work for us."

"Maker's breath, _why?_" Alistair snapped before he could remember to moderate his tone.

There was an attitude of censure in Forender's gaze as he crossed his arms over his chest and looked at Alistair.

"How _is_ your fellow Grey Warden?" he asked in a mild tone that did nothing to calm Alistair. "We were given to understand she was wounded when she went with you into Jarvia's hideout."

"It was only a scratch," Alistair said dismissively, before comprehension dawned. "Is _that_ what this is about?"

"Had we known she would be accompanying you, we wouldn't have dreamt of sending your company after Jarvia. Her inclusion in your endeavor was... ill-advised."

"Yes, we realized that, belatedly," Alistair assured him. "We'd gotten too used to fighting in the open, we didn't realize she just wasn't going to be as effectual in close-quarters combat."

Leliana cleared her throat and Alistair belated realized he probably wasn't helping his case, running off at the mouth about just how much fighting Rìona had been doing.

"Down here everything is close-quarters combat, Grey Warden," Forender said sternly. "If the Assembly comes to think we're sending a pregnant woman to do dangerous errands, opinions would swing dramatically against us. I don't know how such matters are conducted on the surface, but down here, the women who bear children are a precious resource. It's our understanding that Grey Wardens also don't have many children; surely you would not wish to endanger such a rare pregnancy, either. It's simply not done."

"I understand that," Alistair replied. "But it's already done. I can assure you it won't be happening again. Besides, it's not like you'll need us to go clear out the carta anymore."

Forender squirmed again. "Yes, well. Lord Harrowmont cannot take that risk, Grey Warden. Whatever else needs to be done to secure Lord Harrowmont's throne, we will not require your aid. I'm sorry. As I said before, you can be of no further use to us."

Forender turned to walk away, and the guards at the estate gate stepped forward, their posture clearly communicating that they were willing to eject Alistair and Leliana if they didn't choose to leave peacefully.

Grinding his teeth, Alistair impulsively called out, "If this is how Lord Harrowmont keeps to his bargains, perhaps Prince Bhelen will be happy to have our assistance, instead!"

Forender turned and chuckled. "If Prince Bhelen is avaricious enough to send a woman heavy with child into the Deep Roads in an attempt to win the throne, let him. The Assembly won't stand for it; they'll see just how perverted Bhelen's 'progressive' ways of dealing with matters are. They'll turn to the candidate more willing to uphold Orzammar's traditional values."

At Alistair's shoulder, Leliana gasped. He turned to look at her, but she shook her head quickly and gestured at the door.

"What was that about?" Alistair demanded once they were outside the estate.

"I think I know what Lord Harrowmont and Prince Bhelen are each planning to attempt," she said with a slightly smug smile. To Alistair's dismay, he couldn't refute her logic when she explained.

"We can't do that!"

Leliana shrugged. "We may have no choice. Not if we want the aid of one of these candidates."

"Argh!" Alistair gave a short shout of frustration. "I don't bloody _care_ who sits on the throne of Orzammar, so long as we get our troops and get on with ending this Blight before there's no Ferelden left to defend!"

"Surely you don't mean to actually support Bhelen?" She blinked at him in surprise. "You've been so adamantly opposed to him until now."

"I have," Alistair muttered in annoyance. "I think he's rotten, or at least his man Gavorn is. But Duncan said many times that we do what it takes. If we've already damaged Harrowmont's chances, it's starting to look like Bhelen's our best bet for getting someone crowned and seeing this treaty fulfilled. Let's just... get our army and get back to the surface, preferably _before_ Rìona ends up giving birth down here in this miserable hole in the ground." 

* * *

It was several hours before they returned to the boarding house off the trade district. It had been a challenge—requiring a great deal of sweet-talking on Leliana's part—to convince Bhelen's people not to kill them on sight when they arrived at the royal palace seeking an audience with the prince. But at least they had a direction now.

Wynne greeted him in the parlor of the suite they had leased, looking grim. Zevran was seated on a settee behind her, his face carefully blank.

"What is it?" Alistair felt fear tighten his chest, making it suddenly seem as if he couldn't draw a breath. "Is it Rìona?"

Wynne nodded. "She's resting for now, or trying to, but she's in considerable pain. More than I can help with my potions—I'd have to brew them so strong, it wouldn't be safe for the babe. I've tried casting a sleep spell upon her, but her pain is severe enough that it soon awakens her."

"What's wrong with her?"

"The babe is positioned badly at the moment. That, coupled with all the other demands she's been making of herself, is putting a great deal of strain on her spine. It's affecting her ability to move or walk; her leg keeps giving out on her. Until the child moves in a better position, she's not going to be able to travel, and anything more strenuous than travel is definitely out of the question." Wynne sighed. "She cannot continue as she's been doing. It's not merely a matter of putting the well-being of the babe above the duties she must perform. Her own health is in jeopardy. If the babe dies at this point, it will endanger her own life. She could take an infection, or develop a hemorrhage. She _must_ begin to rest more and stop putting such demands upon herself. But she will not hear it from me, Alistair. You must speak with her."

"I will," he sighed, and made his way to the chamber they shared.

The first sound to greet him when he opened the door was a pained whimper.

"Shouldn't you be lying down?" Alistair asked, entering to find her attempting to rise.

"I heard you out in the parlor," Rìona answered, a pained frown creasing her face. "You were gone so long I was afraid something might have happened. How did your audience with Harrowmont go?"

She looked horrible. Her face was drawn, her mouth tight. Her skin was pale beneath the blood still splattered upon her; she hadn't even managed to remove all her armor or bathe since returning from the carta hideout. It was little wonder, he reasoned, for she moved as if the mere effort was excruciating.

"Maker's breath, lie down before you fall over!" Exasperated, Alistair took her by the shoulders with the intent of guiding her back down onto the bed, and she cried out the moment he tried to press her down. "Sweet Andraste, why didn't you tell me it was this bad?"

"We were already in Jarvia's hideout when it really started hurting," she shrugged lamely, slowly crawling back onto the bed and groaning as she sank down upon it. "It's gotten worse since we returned. Wynne said it should pass, but there's no way to know when, or whether it will continue to be a recurring problem. But enough about that. What did Harrowmont say? Does he think he has enough support to take the throne now? Will he give us the aid he promised?"

"No."

"What?" Astonished, Rìona started to rise, but Alistair pushed her back down again, and started to explain what had happened when they called upon Harrowmont.

When he had finished, she snarled in outrage. "Of all the bloody—! What did they _expect_ me to do, sit on my hands here in my room while our people were out hunting Jarvia?"

"I think that's precisely what they expect, and I'm sorry to say, they may have a bit of a point." He braved her glare, drawing a deep breath before plunging onward. "Wynne says you're endangering yourself. I know you've said you won't place the babe above your duties as a Grey Warden, and I've tried to support that as much as possible. But at this point, it's not just a matter of protecting the babe. We can't afford to lose you, love."

"What else can I do?" she asked helplessly. "The Blight isn't going to wait for me to have this child."

"I know." Alistair stroked her hair, sighing. "But chances are the Blight's still going to be here after you've had the babe. We always knew eventually you would need to stop; it just looks like it needs to happen a bit sooner than we had hoped for. Honestly, I think we were likely deluding ourselves, expecting you to push on longer than this without slowing down. At any rate, after Forender turned me away, I went to Bhelen, and he's agreed to work with us in exchange for our support. Right now he can spin your going after Jarvia in his favor, as slander against Harrowmont. He can use it as a sop for some of the more moderate deshyrs who believe he's too radically progressive, as evidence that he's more traditional than they assume, and that Harrowmont is more concerned with power than tradition. Truthfully, I don't think Bhelen would be arsed one way or the other if you fought the Archdemon while whelping, so long as it got him what he wanted without any consequences. But Leliana says it's a matter of politics and appearances, which means we need to make it _appear_ that Bhelen would never demand such a dangerous and unreasonable thing from you. "

"Appear?" Rìona's eyes narrowed. "What precisely is it Bhelen wants us to do on his behalf that would require us to put on such a display?"

"I need to lead our people into the Deep Roads and look for a missing Paragon."

Her mouth fell open in astonishment.

"Maker's breath!" There was no preventing her from rising, this time, unless Alistair was willing to wrestle. "The Deep Roads? Is he mad?"

"Bhelen and Harrowmont both think the Assembly is going to be deadlocked indefinitely, if they can't get the endorsement of this Paragon of theirs, Branka," Alistair explained. "So they're both sending expeditions into the Deep Roads to find her. Bhelen wants us to be first, for obvious reasons."

"Maker! Alistair, I can't possibly do that. Not like this!"

"_I know._ There's more than one reason why you need to stay here. It's better for all of us, including Bhelen, who can then show the dwarves that you're safely out of harm's way under his patronage. That's why Harrowmont doesn't want our endorsement any more; he doesn't trust us not to take you with us, after you went down into Jarvia's hideout."

"Andraste's tits! Just what am I supposed to do while you're gone then?" Rìona demanded. "To come this far and not be able to see it through—" There was a glint of tears in her eyes as she looked at Alistair, but she dashed them away quickly, her movements more angry than grief-stricken.

"I absolutely hate the idea of leaving you, love, but I don't see any other choice." Alistair knelt beside the bed before her, taking her hands and squeezing them firmly. "I don't even know how long we'll be down there. It could be weeks, or longer. Considering the way Bhelen's supporters attacked us when we were endorsing Harrowmont, I'm worried over what Harrowmont's supporters will try if you're here in Orzammar alone, once it's made known that we're now endorsing Bhelen. I _suggested_ to Bhelen that the price of our agreement would be a wagon and an armed escort for you back to Redcliffe, but he made an intriguing counter-offer, if you're interested in hearing it."

Rìona sighed. "I'm listening."

"First of all, he made one very good point. With the darkspawn on the surface, it's possible you'd be more protected here in Orzammar than you would be in Redcliffe."

She nodded slowly. "I can see that. But what if you're gone so long I can't get back to the surface before the babe comes?"

"I can't imagine we could possibly be gone that long. But just in case, I raised that point, too. It turns out, thanks to the dwarves' low birthrates, dwarven midwives take their art _very_ seriously and are extremely skilled. They're actually allowed to go up to the surface to study, where the birthrates are higher and they can get more experience, _without_ giving up their caste as any other dwarf who became a 'surfacer' would have to do. He insists you'll be better off with them than with any human midwife, except for possibly a mage healer. Bhelen has offered you a suite of rooms in the palace, to better protect you against any possible retaliation from Harrowmont's supporters, and the services of the midwife who attended his own consort when she had her child. That is, unless I decide to leave Wynne with you."

"Oh, don't be absurd!" Rìona snapped waspishly. "There's absolutely no chance I'm allowing you to go into the Deep Roads without a healer by your side!"

"What happened to me being the leader?"

"That reaches its limit at the point at which you begin to make utterly asinine suggestions, such as leaving our only mage behind while venturing into darkspawn infested tunnels for weeks, if not months."

Alistair shrugged gamely, grinning. Her ire was oddly charming. "It was worth a try."

She glowered at him for a moment, before she began to chuckle reluctantly. "I suppose I ought to begin making preparations to move to the palace then," she sighed. She began to push herself up off the edge of the bed, and suddenly, all humor fled her face. Alistair _saw_ the pained grimace that contorted her face the instant before her leg simply buckled beneath her.

"Dear Maker!" Alistair caught her before she collapsed and she cried out in pain when he lifted her to deposit her back on the bed.

"It's getting worse," Rìona moaned, slamming her fist against the pillow, her body rigid with pain. After a moment she relaxed slightly and began to attempt to seek out a more comfortable position.

"You've been doing too much," Alistair muttered, stroking her face as she shifted uncomfortably. "I'm sorry. I should have taken over sooner. We should have stopped off at Redcliffe and left you there before proceeding to Orzammar, rather than bringing you all this way."

"No, Alistair. No." Rìona shook her head. "We've done what we needed to do. I've pushed myself too hard, determined I wasn't going to let this affect me. It was... foolish. Of course things are going to change. How can they not?"

"Is there anything I can do?" he asked helplessly.

She offered him a halfhearted effort at a smile. "We could try that salve Wynne made for me, if you wouldn't mind massaging it into my back."

Alistair froze, remembering the way she had cried out when he tried to move her. The thought of trying to touch her now terrified him. His hands were too big, too strong, too clumsy. He had no idea what he was doing; he'd hurt her if he tried. Rìona was desperate enough to let him make the attempt, but he quailed at the idea of causing her more pain.

"First things first, let's get this blood off you. Will it hurt too much if I help you remove your armor and carry you to the bath?"

"Perhaps the bath will help."

The process of getting her undressed and into the bath was enough to convince him that if he wasn't careful, he was likely to cause her more distress than relief. It was a fear that was confirmed when he tried to massage in the unguent. The moment he applied pressure she cried out and he jerked his hands back as though he'd been burnt.

"I'm sorry!" He cursed, frustrated with himself. He thought he was over feeling like a clod with her.

"It's all right," she murmured with a hint of reluctant acceptance. "It's all right. We'll just forego the salve."

That made it even worse, that she would go on suffering because he didn't know how to give her relief. He didn't like this helpless, powerless feeling.

"I'll... be right back," he said abruptly, rising from the bed and striding from the room. He didn't let himself think too hard, he wouldn't have the guts to do what he knew he needed to do.

Zevran opened the door to his room at Alistair's brusque, rough rap, a dagger clenched in his fist.

"I have no right to ask this of you," Alistair said tightly, launching himself into his request before his nerves got the better of him. "It's completely unfair to you. Don't think I don't know it. But she's in pain and I can't help her."

He had been half-afraid that Zevran would begin to ask questions, ask Alistair what he expected Zevran to do about it. That would have led to talking and thinking about this decision, and Alistair wasn't certain he was up for that conversation.

He should have known better.

Something tightened Zevran's eyes and mouth for a moment, before his face shut down, a mask of blank impassivity sliding over his features. He waited a short, tense moment, watching the assassin weigh the decision before giving a brusque nod. No questions. No examination. Only the agreement to do what needed to be done, and sort out the messy stuff another time.

Zevran set his dagger aside, rather than secreting it on his person before proceeding Alistair back to the room he shared with Rìona. Not since the day Rìona had handed him his weapons back had Alistair seen Zevran unarmed. He wondered if it was a deliberate choice, or if Zevran was just too distracted to think about what he was doing.

Rìona's eyes widened with astonishment when she saw Zevran come through the door. Though she possessed no modesty Alistair had ever been able to detect, she immediately clutched the sheet over her nude body. That, Alistair thought with a mental sigh of resignation, spoke volumes.

"Zevran, what—?" Her eyes darted back and forth between the two of them, confused.

Alistair had to give Zevran credit for the casual cheer he affected. "Apparently rumor of my awesome proficiency at massage has reached your templar. He thought I might be able to help you, and so here I am."

Rìona looked at Alistair, and now there was anger simmering in her gaze. "Alistair, no. This isn't—"

"Tch, _querida_," Zevran said soothingly. "This is not the time for such considerations. For now, we much concentrate on getting you back on your feet, yes? Come. Let's make you comfortable."

Alistair found himself shunted into the role of observer, as Zevran briskly arranged the pillows around Rìona so that she could lay partially on her side, leaning forward slightly, without any undue strain on her back. He took a chair across the room and watched the process, as Rìona's misgivings gave way before her need to ease her pain. She surrendered herself to Zevran's ministrations, but her eyes when she looked at Alistair were accusing. It really was terribly unfair to ask this of Zevran, and she knew that as well. Another day, Alistair might have cared. Today, however, there was only her suffering and the certainty that Zevran, with his quick, clever, nimble hands, would know best how to help her.

Which turned out to be exactly the case. It was only an instant after Zevran set his hands upon her back, massaging in the salve Wynne had made, that Rìona's eyes closed and a moan that was half-pain and half-relief slid from her lips.

Despite the inappropriate timing, Alistair found himself shifting uncomfortably. That moan sounded like... something else entirely.

It quickly became a torment, watching them. He shouldn't be reacting this way, but the contortions in Rìona's face, the sounds she made, all of them were far too close to expressions and sounds she had made in far more erotic circumstances. His body reacted to them now as it had then, without volition. Alistair tried to will it away, for it was damned sure he'd find no outlet for it tonight, under the circumstances. The response was wildly out of place, embarrassing him as well as making him ache.

He tore his eyes away from Rìona's strained face, so close to the way it looked as she neared her climax, and made himself look at Zevran instead. Zevran, who was so intent upon his task that he was forgetting to be guarded and impassive. The look on his face should have made Alistair furious. Coupled with the sight of Zevran's hands upon her, it should have driven him into a possessive rage. Instead, all it made him do was remember those nights he had lain alone in his tent and listened to the two of them, wondering what exactly they were doing to create those sighs and moans.

Then, he had tried to erase Zevran from the picture in his mind. Now, he couldn't. All he could do was envision that same tender, intent expression on Zevran's face as he wrenched those sounds from Rìona's lips in an entirely different context.

Maker, this wasn't helping.

And then Zevran raised his eyes and met Alistair's gaze. Alistair felt pinned, trapped, exposed. He didn't know if his discomposure was so obvious, or if it was just his imagination that envisioned a slight smirk tugging at the corner of Zevran's mouth. Again, that night when they returned from the Korcari Wilds to confront Morrigan sprang to his mind.

_Do you think you could not find pleasure at my hands, or release between my lips, if I offered them to you?_

Alistair's hands gripped the arms of his chair, preparing to surge up out of his chair and flee the room before he humiliated himself, but something leery in Zevran's eyes stopped him.

Suddenly, he realized Zevran wasn't smirking at him. In fact, the possibility of Alistair's arousal and the cause of it was the last thing on Zevran's mind. He was... checking the weather, trying to see just how close Alistair was to reacting possessively.

Maker! He had assumed Zevran's wariness when Alistair first requested his help had to do with a reluctance to be closer to Rìona than he had to be, to protect himself. But no. It was Alistair's response he feared.

It was a bit insulting, actually, to discover Zevran suspected that Alistair would instigate such a situation and then react badly to it. But, in fairness, Alistair realized he'd given Zevran—and Rìona, as well—plenty of reason to doubt how gracefully he would handle such things. And if he ran from the room right now, it would confirm Zevran's suspicions, and no doubt distress Rìona.

He forced himself to release his grip on the chair, and to _not_ conspicuously drape his hands over his lap, a move that would no doubt draw Zevran's attention to the real source of the problem. Instead, he looked away, and did his best to ignore the two of them.

It was quite some time later when he realized Rìona was quiet. He looked over to see her eyes closed and her face soft in repose. Zevran withdrew his hands the moment he caught Alistair's eyes upon him, and Alistair wondered just how long it had been since she had fallen asleep, and whether Zevran had continued his massage out of nothing more than reluctance to let go.

Strangely, the thought didn't bother him as it once might have.

"She should be able to rest comfortably now, for a while," Zevran said, his tone muted. He crawled off the bed from where he knelt behind Rìona, and Alistair made himself look away, quashing the curiosity to see if Zevran had responded to the situation also.

"Thank you." He realized only after he'd said it how curt and dismissive the clipped words seemed. Damn. He just wanted to end this before Zevran caught on to what had really been going through his mind, forcing him to confront something he wasn't quite certain he was ready to deal with. "No, I mean... _thank you._"

Zevran looked like he was on the verge of saying something, but then he bit it back. He bowed his head in a deep nod and took his leave.

The relief Alistair had been expecting to find himself alone again, however, was not forthcoming.

He lay awake beside Rìona long into the "night," staring into the utter blackness that came of sleeping underground, and wondered precisely what any of them were going to do. Finally, he gave up on sleeping and lit an oil lamp, digging through their packs for the treaty scrolls he and Rìona had brought from the Korcari Wilds half a year ago. They'd both been over them, but perhaps if he combed over the treaty with the dwarves again, he might find a way to break the stalemate and get their troops without having to jump through Bhelen or Harrowmont's hoops.

It wasn't long before Rìona began to thrash, and Alistair set aside his scroll. Apparently it was time for the archdemon to pay a visit to her dreams. After a moment, her eyes flew open as she gave a startled cry.

"How are you feeling?" he asked softly as she lay there, breathlessly trying to get her bearings.

"Better, I think." She stretched cautiously, checking to see if the motion hurt. "Not that I'm ready to attend any balls and dance the night away, of course, but I may actually be able to move tomorrow."

"I'm glad."

He felt her eyes upon him, her gaze frankly probing, but he couldn't look at her, even when she asked, "And what of you?"

Somehow he didn't think she was inquiring about his physical state. Like Zevran had done earlier, she was cautiously checking his emotional temperature.

Maker. Had he been such a prat that everyone felt they had to walk on eggshells around him?

Yes, he thought wryly, perhaps he had at that.

He'd been trying to avoid discussing Zevran for weeks, ever since that afternoon she had been caught out in the storm. He'd hoped the problem would find a way to resolve itself, but it wasn't. Zevran was bending over backwards to be far more honorable than Alistair would ever have expected him to be. It wasn't fair, to let that situation linger. And Rìona...

Each time Zevran's name was mentioned, she looked guilty. Miserable.

Ashamed.

"I'm fine," he replied carefully, his body beginning to tighten again in memory of just how _fine_ he'd been, watching them two of them together.

Her mouth tightened, and she fell silent for a long moment, before asking softly, "How long are we going to go on not talking about this?"

"I don't know what to say," he sighed. "I'd rather hoped the whole thing might simply... resolve itself. Somehow."

"Well, it's not."

"Clearly." Frustrated, Alistair ran his hand through his hair, released from its braided queue. "You know, I've barely had six weeks to get used to the idea of actually being with you. I just... that doesn't seem like enough time to bask in it all, take it all in, without a complication of this magnitude arising."

"I know," she murmured, and her eyes dropped away from his. She looked wretched.

Alistair rose from his chair and approached the bed, kneeling beside her. When he took her hand, her eyes began to shine wetly in the lamplight.

"He's in love with you." He forced himself to say it, to acknowledge the thing they both knew and had been avoiding.

"Yes."

"And you're in love with him."

A tear slipped from the corner of her eye, and she nodded.

He reached out to brush it away, but it was quickly replaced by another. Her misery tore at him.

"Don't, love. Just... don't. I swear to you, I'm not angry."

"I'm so sorry," she whispered brokenly. "I never thought this would happen."

"Maker's breath, you think I don't know that?" Alistair squeezed her hand harder. "Don't be sorry, love. Please. I swore to you before we began this that I was ready to accept you as you are. Besides, what happened to the woman who told me in Redcliffe that she wouldn't be shamed? Have _I_ done this? Do I make you ashamed?"

"I don't know!" Sniffling, she shook her head desperately back and forth upon the pillow. "I love you. I do, more than I ever believed possible. I can't bear the thought of losing you. But I can't stand to continue to hurt him, either. And I'm so _angry_ at myself for not being content with what I have, which is more than I ever dreamed. I fear I'm going to ruin everything and hurt us all."

"I suppose then that it won't help matters if I offered to step aside?" Sweet Andraste, it hurt to even think it, but he had to make the offer. "Really, I'm the interloper here. Not him."

"Is that what you _want_ to do?" Her voice was hollow and resigned.

"No! Maker, no!" Alistair pressed a hard, desperate kiss to her lips. "I just... needed to get that option out of the way. As a point of honor, if nothing else. You know, Zevran once told me he couldn't think of any sin he might have committed heinous enough to merit being forced to sit by and watch you and I pining for each other. Now I think I rather understand what he meant."

"I'm sorry," she muttered again, her eyes clouding.

"No. _No._ Maybe... maybe this time in the Deep Roads isn't necessarily a bad thing. Maybe it will give me a chance to figure out... everything."

"I see." She nodded again, glancing away, and Alistair felt guilty for being so vague, when he already knew what the answer to their problem might be. He knew Rìona had to have thought it; with her parents, how could she not? But she hadn't proposed it, even though she'd warned him the day he offered to court her that she wasn't certain she could commit herself exclusively to him. He knew she was avoiding doing so to spare his sensibilities.

_And I think you are not the sort of man who would consider sharing his love with another._

Zevran had thought of it as well, and dismissed it as a possibility.

Could he do such a thing? Alistair wondered. Mere weeks ago, he knew the answer would have been a resounding "no." He could never have imagined being like her father. But now, after tonight, after the way he had responded to imagining the two of them together... he didn't know.

He'd already crossed so many lines, come to accept things he had never considered before. Surely there must be a limit, somewhere, to what he was willing to embrace. He couldn't dangle that out before her unless he was certain he could handle it, or this already convoluted situation would become an utter disaster.

For a moment, he was tempted to offer to leave Zevran here with her in Orzammar, to protect her in case Harrowmont's supporters got past Bhelen's guard. Then he could spend his time in the Deep Roads getting used to the idea of what he would inevitably find when he came back. It would take care of the problem nicely, and yet...

No. That wouldn't be right. He couldn't leave the burden of resolving this upon the two of them, especially when they would both no doubt spend their time dreading his return, for fear that he would be angry or unable to cope. Perhaps once, he might have done something so passively manipulative, but not now.

"We'll figure it out, love. Somehow," he swore instead, and kissed her again.


	44. Chapter Forty Four: Darkness

_You get this one a few hours early, as I'm dealing with a very sick little boy today and likely won't have time later._

* * *

He approached Alistair in the darkness, when all the others except Shale were asleep.

"Treating your companions badly will not free you of this place any sooner."

"I know." There was something ragged and full of despair in Alistair's voice, carried on his muted reply. Here, far beyond the edge of the campfire they had built, there was no light to see his eyes. For the first time in the months since Zevran had joined their company, he felt fear in the presence of the templar. That was not the voice of a stable man. "You just—you can't know what it's _like._"

Zevran scoffed. "My mother was Dalish. For all that I have spent my life in the city, that blood is still within me. You think I don't understand the panic of being trapped so far underground for so long?"

"That's not what I'm talking about." His voice stopped just short of being snappish. "Being a Grey Warden down here. It's... not what I expected."

"The presence of the darkspawn is an irritant?"

"No. That's just it. I expected it to be, but it's not." There was a heavy sigh in the darkness. "It's... peaceful. Like I spend every day of my life going in the wrong direction, and now I'm finally going in the _right_ direction and the tugging isn't so bad anymore. And they're calling to me. _Join us._ I thought they were just... words in a ceremony. Maker help me. It shouldn't feel _good_to be heading toward them. It makes me wonder if I can trust myself."

He increased their watch shifts after that, despite the fact that it meant they all got less sleep. He tried, for a time, to be less irritable with all of them, but at intervals Zevran found himself somehow silently and unanimously nominated to run interference again. At which time he found himself filling the role of confidante to the troubled Grey Warden, a man he should hate and couldn't quite manage it.

He should refuse, he knew. And yet he also knew _she_would want him to do it, to give her beloved a much-needed sounding board as he struggled to lead them.

"How long do you think we've been down here?" Alistair asked at one such instance. They were in the dark again, away from camp, where they might speak without disturbing the others. Zevran found he was getting used to it, though something within him still itched at not being able to read the eyes of the person standing with him for hints presaging an attack.

"I cannot say. The dwarf says two weeks, but it feels like much longer."

"The longer it takes us to finish this, the less chance we'll be back to Orzammar before it's time for Rìona to have the babe."

Zevran attempted nonchalance and failed, badly. "She will have the child whether we are there or not. There is little you or I can do to affect the outcome."

"True, but Wynne could," Alistair shot back. Zevran's grimaced, and though Alistair couldn't see it, he dipped his head in acknowledgment of the point. "Blight take me! I should have left her with Rìona, no matter how hard either of them argued!"

Zevran was grimly silent, and after a moment, he heard the rustling of Alistair passing his hand over his hair. Zevran's own scalp itched in response. It had been many days since they'd left Caridin's Cross, where there had been deep wells of frigid water with which to wash and refill their waterskins.

"Sorry," the templar muttered after a moment. "There's nothing we can do about it now and I know it. It's just... my mother died in childbirth."

"Ah." Understanding dawned. He didn't like that nauseating sense of fear that settled deep in his gut at that particular thought, and sought refuge in humor that fell flat. "Mine did as well. My first victim, as it were."

"Is that so?" Alistair made a humorless, bitter sound. "Well, it seems we have something in common in our pasts, after all."

"So we do."

Two marches later, they reached Ortan Thaig. Alistair's rage when it turned into simply another stop along Branka's route was spectacular, and even Zevran avoided him until it had burnt itself out. There was nothing he could say to comfort Alistair, for Zevran understood all too well the sense of urgency driving him. Bad enough, the idea that they might lose Rìona to something neither of them could fight or control; worse still that they might do so without ever seeing her again, without a chance to truly say good-bye.

"The last time she and I spoke, she was in tears," Alistair said flatly in the darkness when Zevran finally approached him again, somewhere along the way to the Dead Trenches. "Over _you._"

"Ah." Zevran didn't know how to answer that. He couldn't apologize for what he couldn't control.

"I should hate you." Strangely, there was no bitterness in Alistair's tone. Only resignation. "But you were there for her, taking care of her when I still had my head up my arse."

And still Zevran held his silence, uncertain where the templar was going with his confession.

"I offered to step aside, just so you know." That arched Zevran's eyebrows in surprise. "She refused."

"Of course she did." Zevran's response was quick and dismissive. "You are the one she wants. You have always been, since before I ever came along. I am the one who keeps complicating matters with my presence. She has made her choice."

Alistair snorted. "No, she hasn't. She _can't_choose."

"Then we must decide for her. I will leave, when we reach Orzammar. You will have your army then, and will no longer need every person you can get to fight by your side. And she will have her child soon and will have little attention to spare for one man, much less two. It is the best way."

"Is it?"

Something prickled along Zevran's spine. A predator's instinct, alerting him to an opening, an opportunity to exploit. It would be easy, so easy, to trawl out bait of another kind, drop hints of other arrangements that could be made. Especially when that prickling was accompanied by the same awareness he'd felt when he'd looked up from massaging Rìona's back to find Alistair watching him intently, a heat that lurked somewhere between anger and arousal in his eyes. It reminded Zevran all too keenly that he'd been sleeping alone for months now.

With anyone but this man, he would have attempted it. But Alistair would never be amenable to such a proposal, however unexpectedly understanding he was of the dilemma in which Zevran and Rìona found themselves. It didn't matter that Alistair was sometimes attracted to him—not that he would ever admit it. No, not the templar, who had proven himself so inflexible in such matters in the past, even if it _seemed_as though Alistair had deliberately opened the door for just such a discussion.

"It is," Zevran said firmly, trying to give the words the sense of finality the discussion needed. He walked away quickly, then, before he could be tempted by such far-fetched ideas again.

It was in Bownammar that everything came to a head. First, encountering the strange and pathetic wretch, Hespith, and then the thing she called a broodmother. The horror of understanding just what fate awaited women who fell into darkspawn hands paralyzed them all for a moment, slowing their response to the tentacles that erupted from the ground, lashing and grasping at them.

It was only by chance that Zevran noticed the darkspawn that poured into the cavern and surrounded Leliana, cornering her.

No. Not cornering. Corralling.

"_Sten!_" Zevran shouted, darting through masses of writhing tentacles to try to reach the bard before she could be dragged away. With a mighty roar, the qunari charged into the fray, severing darkspawn heads and cleaving their limbs from their bodies. They made it through to her, but it was a near thing, and it took them considerably longer to subdue and kill the broodmother as a result, for they did not dare leave Leliana unguarded again.

When it was over, and the monstrosity known as the broodmother screamed its final hoarse death-cry, they looked up, high up, at the rock ledge above them all, where the taint-infected dwarven woman had watched them fight. Alistair roared with rage when she disappeared.

"Fan out!" he snapped. "Find her! We can't allow her to finish transforming or become one of these... things, and begin to make more darkspawn."

It said something about the templar's state, that his first concern was not mercy.

"It would be unwise to separate, right now," Sten said before Zevran could make the same point. "We are all injured and weary from the battle, and we cannot afford to leave the priestess unguarded."

Alistair's eyes narrowed as he stared at Leliana, who was visibly shaken and seemed on the edge of tears. His jaw tightened and his hand clenched the hilt of his sword. In that instant, he saw Leliana not as a friend and comrade, but as a potential threat. Zevran feared he might be so far from himself that he would try to strike her down.

Then Alistair subsided with a growl and stalked away, kicking at darkspawn corpses and cursing loudly. Wynne pulled Leliana into a comforting embrace as the bard began to weep softly, overcome by horror and relief. Why the darkspawn hadn't targeted Wynne was anyone's guess. Perhaps they needed younger women to be broodmothers, or perhaps the spirit within her made her an unappealing prospect for them.

It was some time before Alistair returned, calmer but still tense. By then, the rest of them had found an area reasonably clean of rotting, corrupted flesh and detritus in which to heal, eat and rest.

"Leliana, I'm sending you back to Orzammar. We don't know how much longer we'll be down here or how many more darkspawn we'll encounter. It's too big a risk, having you with us. Once we've all had a chance to rest, you'll leave," he announced without preamble. A muscle in his jaw quivered with agitation. "Sten, I'm sending you with her. Hopefully the way back will be clear after all we've done to get here. I'm sorry, Leliana, but... Sten, if you're overwhelmed and it looks like you're not going to make it out, you need to make certain _she_doesn't fall into their hands."

Leliana gasped and Wynne began to protest. Even Sten looked surprised by the directive.

Zevran stepped up to stand at Alistair's shoulder, making a show of support. "My dear bard, surely you would wish for such a mercy, if it came to that."

After a moment, Leliana blinked and gave a quick, jerky nod. She was still pale, but some measure of peace came over her haunted face. "You're right, of course. Thank you."

Alistair nodded once, and walked away again, briskly. He fairly ripped off his armor and then left their campsite, striding into the darkness. When Zevran awoke for his watch shift, he still hadn't returned.

As he found himself doing so regularly these days, Zevran went walking carefully through the darkness, seeking him in the shadows where the light of the campfire was only a distant glow to guide them back. As was his habit, he never brought a torch, and he always wondered at himself for that choice. It seemed easier and more comfortable, somehow, for the two of them to talk under cloak of darkness, where they didn't have to meet each other's eyes.

Zevran stepped lightly, silently, feeling the crumbling of the cavern wall with his hand, until he heard the sound of someone breathing.

"My friend?" he ventured softly.

"I'm here." He was closer than Zevran had estimated; a step or two further and Zevran would have bumped into him. The templar's voice was ragged, clogged, and Zevran wondered if he'd been weeping—or struggling against the impulse—here in the dark.

For the first time, Zevran realized not all of his compassion for this struggling young man who was fighting so hard and earnestly to save them all was strictly about _her._It troubled him, to find Alistair in this state.

"You did the right thing, my friend," he said softly. "The hard thing, yes, but right all the same. The bard will be the first to tell you so, when her shock has worn off."

Alistair laughed bitterly at that. "Right. Of course I did. I'm sure Rìona would have done the same."

"It does not matter what she would do. She is not here. These burdens fall upon you."

"I guess they do, don't they?" He sounded defeated, hopeless. "Strange. I've always thought of myself as a merciful man, but I'm not. All these months, I've protested whenever Rìona told me how ruthless Duncan was, unwilling to hear anything about him besides the kindness I knew from him. I never stopped to think maybe I didn't want to hear it because I'm the same way. For a instant there today, I would have killed Leliana, just for being the possibility of a threat. I would have let the werewolves kill Zathrian and all his people for deceiving us. I even wanted to kill you, that day you ambushed us."

"What, and waste all my irresistible charm, devastating good looks and superlative skill as a lover? Unthinkable!"

The words fell from Zevran's mouth without thought. Instinct, to tease and flirt, trying to add levity to a grim situation while giving nothing of himself away.

It didn't work.

"Don't do that," Alistair snapped unexpectedly. "Andraste's mercy, the way you and Rìona define yourselves! With her it's always sex, with you it's always sex or killing."

Zevran shrugged, though he knew Alistair could not see it, and made himself say casually, "And so it is."

"No, it isn't," the templar replied, his voice tight and almost angry. "If it were, she wouldn't love you and I wouldn't—Oh, Maker!"

And then there was a sense of movement, something rushing toward him. Zevran's hand was upon his dagger in an instant, but by then, Alistair's hands were already upon him, grasping at him. The templar's body pressed against his and the growth of beard he'd acquired all these long weeks in the Deep Roads scraped Zevran's face, clumsily seeking, before his lips found their goal.

More unexpected still, when Zevran found himself responding, releasing his grip on the dagger to rest his hands at Alistair's waist and draw him closer. He opened his mouth and beckoned Alistair's tongue inside, swiping at it with his own as it thrust roughly in. It had been too long since he'd embraced another man; he'd nearly forgotten the wild flavor of unchecked aggression, the delicious lack of delicacy and restraint. Zevran's body sought more, even as his mind reeled and tried to make sense of it.

How had he misread this man so completely? He had dismissed the possibility that Alistair would ever act upon the latent attraction that occasionally buzzed between them.

He should stop this, he knew. Instead, his thighs bracketed one of Alistair's, and he pressed closer to that hard bulge against against his belly. They both groaned at the increase in pressure.

Surely this couldn't be what Alistair truly wanted. It was merely distress and desperation. Zevran knew beyond a doubt that the moment would come when Alistair suffered regrets and decided it had been a mistake.

But there was no uncertainty in the way Alistair's hand—after maddeningly long moments in which their mouths clashed and devoured—tried to wedge itself down the front of Zevran's breeches. There was no room, and so instead Alistair's palm bumped up and down the ridges of Zevran's leather laces, stroking him. His touch was unskilled, yes, but there was no ambivalence or hesitation in it. Zevran's better nature began to buckle before the twin imperatives of need and long-denied pleasure. A few jerks and rough pushes and his cod flap was open and Alistair's fingers encircled him. Zevran's body responded of its own volition, seeking more of that touch, that nearness, that connection.

He felt behind him and yes, thankfully there was a wall. He slumped against it and gave himself over to the pulls of that large, rough hand, bucking into the tight ring of Alistair's fist. In other circumstances, it might have been embarrassing, how little it took to bring him to climax, but it had been too long, and Alistair's urgency was contagious. He rested his head against the stone wall, panting as his heart slowed its racing, and Alistair withdrew his hand and pressed against Zevran again, intimately close. Not groping. Resting. Almost embracing. Against Zevran's belly, Alistair's own need throbbed, neglected.

"Please... Zevran..." That one gasped entreaty, barely a whisper next to the point of his ear, spelt the end of Zevran's lingering reticence.

Alistair's gasps were needy and desperate against his mouth as Zevran's hands pulled at the drawstring of his breeches and pushed them down his hips. This was no time or place for the finer points of pleasure. They were both covered in the dirt of weeks of travel; sweat and grit and the blood of their foes. Zevran spat into his palm and wrapped his fingers around Alistair's length, stroking, stroking, in time to the frantic thrusts of Alistair's hips. When the templar's balance began to suffer, Zevran switched their positions, so that it was he pressing Alistair to the wall, urging him on with growls and whispers in Antivan.

Alistair spent himself with a low groan in the darkness, his seed lost with Zevran's on the dusty floor of the tunnel.

Silence fell, punctuated only by the gradual subsiding of Alistair's harsh panting. Zevran, who had never been one for questioning his pleasures, found himself unwilling to withdraw gracefully and write this off as a fluke, something to be enjoyed and forgotten.

After all, that assumption hadn't served him very well, the last time he'd made it.

He did, however, feel a strong need to take the offensive, and strike the first blow before Alistair could thank him, with the distant politeness a particularly kind man might show a whore.

Or worse, apologize. Retreat. Call it a mistake, something shameful, to be hidden and henceforth avoided.

The longer the silence spun out, the stronger the temptation became, until Zevran was nearly quivering with the need to lash out. Strange, for all that it was Rìona who had claimed his heart, it was Alistair who made Zevran feel vulnerable and exposed. Over and over, his honesty and sincerity stripped away Zevran's bland and humorous masks until it seemed he _must_react aggressively in the absence of any other disguise.

He'd given away too much already. Left himself far too open and defenseless as he waited on the outskirts, trying to be fair and selfless and _good_.

He was not a _good_man. He was not a noble or an honorable man, unless it suited his purposes to be so, and it was past time the templar remembered that.

Zevran pushed himself away. His mouth opened, scathing words perched on his tongue, ready to leap into the chasm between them, preemptively committing emotional suicide.

Alistair spoke an instant before they did so, a note of calm humor in his breathless voice that had been missing all these weeks in the Deep Roads. He was damn near chuckling. "Well. This is an interesting development."

The savage, vile words Zevran had been about to hurl stumbled to a halt as the gate of his teeth came snapping down with an audible click. Tense and poised for combat, he gritted out his next response with tightly leashed aggression, "If you apologize, I will slit your throat."

"I didn't intend to." Affront was palpable in Alistair's response, and Zevran heard the rustling of his clothing as the templar pulled his breeches back up, bringing to mind the fact that Zevran's own cock was still hanging out. As though girding himself, he tucked himself in and began fumbling with the laces of his breeches. The need to attack still quivered along his nerves, making him jumpy and irritable.

He forced himself to wait, just a moment longer to see what developed. But not passively—no, there would be no more of that.

Like a predator, then, seeking the right moment to strike, if the need arose.

"If I _were_going to apologize," Alistair said at last, his inflection giving his words a wry twist, "it would be for... presuming... rather than asking permission. Turns out—as much to my own surprise as anyone's—I'm a bit of a brute at times."

Zevran stared into the pitch darkness from which Alistair's voice was coming, still only a step or two away. _That_was the templar's most pressing concern, that he might have trespassed where he was not welcome?

That sort of courtly consideration—however belated—was not what he was expecting, particularly with the inherent respect it implied. Zevran felt some of that quivering eagerness to take the offensive subside.

"I appreciate the sentiment," Zevran said cautiously. "For future reference, I am more than happy to accommodate any other such delightfully brutish inclinations you may harbor. What I am not willing to do is wait any longer upon your—forgive me for saying it—_uncertain_will."

"That's fair enough." Alistair sighed. "It seems a bit ridiculous to be worrying about that down here, though."

"Yes, yes, we may all die tomorrow, but when has this not been true? I am as aware as you of our other, more pressing concerns, my friend. So I will make this very simple. I am done waiting for you, or even her, to decide the outcome of our little drama for me. I am not like our sweet Warden, who fears your hatred so much she waited months for you to resolve yourself to pursue her. I have been gallant and restrained for the last time."

In the darkness, he heard Alistair swallow hard. Was he nervous?

Good.

"The next time I seek you out in the darkness, the pleasure we share will not be an accident born of a momentary loss of control." Forward, Zevran stepped, silently, so that Alistair's only indication that he had moved at all was the instant of contact. The templar took an involuntary step backward, but he was against the wall, and Zevran pressed in close, feeling his tense, shuddering response.

"I will seduce you as ruthlessly as I ever did any mark. There is no in-between. I will be your lover or I will be your rival. You are free to reject me, but if you do so, when we return to Orzammar, I will demand Rìona make a choice, however painful it may be for her. I assure you, I see no profit whatsoever in a fair fight on this issue. We will all be together, or one of us will lose everything. It may very well be me, but I would rather bring us all down in flames than abide any more _waiting._"

A moment of silent tension fell, until Alistair asked tersely, "And what, precisely, is it that makes you think I'm going to respond to an ultimatum?"

Zevran's hands twitched with the urge to reach for his daggers, a futile impulse seeing as he wasn't actually willing to kill Alistair. Yet. With the option of violence cut off, suddenly it was Alistair stalking forward, forcing Zevran to give way, step by step, driven the final few inches by the templar's hands on his shoulders, pushing him against the cavern wall with no particular concern for gentleness.

So maybe violence wasn't off the table—but no, then that bearded face was seeking his again, lips hot and rough and urgent, plundering and then just as abruptly gone. Zevran, his keenest weapon momentarily blunted, yielded the moment.

"Go ahead and _try_your seduction." He growled the invitation in Zevran's ear. "But if I'm with you, it won't be because I was blackmailed into it."

And then Alistair was gone, his heavy, determined footfalls striding back down the tunnel toward the cavern where the others were camped.

After a surprised moment, Zevran began to smile, which quickly blossomed into an irrepressible grin.

This was going to be _interesting._

_Author's Note: This chapter is something of a milestone. RCD, the very, very rough/first draft of the novel that has now become _Elysium_, was 44 chapters and ~212K words. _Elysium_ passed 212K a few chapters back, but here is chapter 44. I'm presently beginning work on Chapter 52, and I doubt it will be wrapped up before I hit Chapter 60. Still, the end is in sight. By the time it's done, I will have been writing it for nearly a year (first chapter of RCD was... June 14, I think) and posting at least twice a week for that entire time, with the exception of the two months it took me to build a chapter buffer after RCD ended and the writing for _Elysium_began._

Wow. I need a drink.


	45. Chapter Forty Five: Facades

Rìona's first week in the royal palace was spent largely in the bedchamber of the suite of rooms she had been given. The walk from the boarding house, where she had been staying, to the palace had been enough to convince her that time off her feet was definitely what she needed to recuperate. Her time was spent reading scrolls delivered from the Shaperate, trying to understand Orzammar's political dynamics better. Her meals were brought to her by a servant, along with a food-taster whose services she declined to use. If someone wanted her dead badly enough to get past Bhelen's security, they would no doubt find a way. There was no sense jeopardizing another life attempting to avoid it.

True to his word, Bhelen sent the royal midwife to attend her. She was a cheerful woman, and did seem quite knowledgeable about her art. She examined Rìona's belly with firm but gentle hands and declared the babe the perfect size for the amount of time Rìona claimed to have been carrying it. She was aghast that Rìona had been fighting until so recently, and taking such risks with her pregnancy, and Rìona mutely allowed her the assumption that Harrowmont's avarice had been to blame for such a state of affairs. The judgment would no doubt filter to others of the midwife's profession, and from there to the pregnant women they attended and the rest of their households. Harrowmont's supporters would be hard-pressed to counter such a damning accusation when the dwarven smith Janar had already spread the tale of how the Wardens had emerged from Jarvia's lair into his shop, Rìona covered in blood and limping.

If she might have once scrupled at besmirching Harrowmont's reputation needlessly, that was no longer a problem. Alistair had the right of it; they needed to get a commitment for their treaty troops with _someone_, and if Bhelen was their most likely chance, then Rìona would do everything within her power to aid his ascension to the throne.

After a week, when her babe had shifted and her pain was gone, allowing her to walk without her knee buckling beneath her, she began to leave her rooms. The midwife had been quite firm about the benefits of gentle activity once she felt capable of it, and so she dutifully strolled the palace corridors, wondering what the weather was like on the surface. No doubt summer was well underway; it would have been pleasant to get some fresh air, but she didn't dare take the risk of leaving the palace.

As a courtesy, Bhelen's consort, Rica, summoned a dressmaker to make a couple of gowns for Rìona so that she need not wear her armor or the stained and tattered linen garments she had arrived with, and if the dwarven mode wasn't quite what she was used to, the gowns were comfortable enough and made her feel less conspicuous than having her belly hanging out of her Dalish armor had done.

Suitably attired, she began attending sessions of the Assembly of Deshyrs, watching the dwarven political process in all its deadlocked and convoluted chaos. There were days of endless and futile debate during which nothing was ever decided. She also began joining the royal family, and other residents of the palace, for supper in the great hall in the evenings, and it was there that she encountered another human face.

"Greetings, my lady," the man rose from his chair at one of the tables and offered her a bow. He was handsome enough, but his pallor suggested he'd been in Orzammar for quite some time, and his paunch suggested he was not a man of arms or activity. "I must say I'm surprised to see another human here. There have been none but me and my guards for months; I didn't think they were letting visitors into Orzammar until the succession was settled."

Rìona offered him a bright smile. After all, it never hurt to be charming, at least until she knew who she was dealing with. "Good evening to you, kind ser. I am here by the prince's invitation. Though, you are correct. For the most part, outsiders are not being allowed into Orzammar."

"Ambassador Gainley, at your service," he swept another bow. "Come, dine with me, my lady, and tell me what business brings you to Orzammar."

Rìona hesitated only a moment, trying to decide how best to answer. Whose emissary was this Gainley? Was he an appointee of Cailan's, predating the king's death? Or was he in Loghain's pocket? Would she be hurting her cause, by revealing herself as a Grey Warden?

"I am Rìona Cousland, ambassador," she said politely, accepting the chair he pulled out for her.

"Eh? Cousland, you say!" His mouth tightened, and he quickly sat down, obviously deciding she needed no further help with her chair. "Last word to reach me from the surface was that all your line was dead. I assume you're here on some business for Orlais?"

"Orlais?" She gave an exaggerated blink of surprise. "Maker, no! What would I have to do with the Orlesians?"

"The Couslands were traitors," Gainley replied coldly. Loghain's man, then? "Orlesian spies, is the rumor."

"Rumor is not necessarily fact, ser," Rìona replied cooly. If he was ignorant enough not to associate her presence with the rumors of the Grey Wardens in Orzammar, she would use that to her advantage. Perhaps if rumor of Howe's duplicity came from a man in Loghain's employ, it might weaken Howe and undermine his influence, perhaps even strip him of Loghain's protection. Of course, this could all blow up in her face if he turned out to be Howe's flunky instead. "If it were, surely I would be seeing sanctuary in Val Royeaux rather than here. No, I'm afraid our regent has been greatly deceived by one of his most trusted advisers. I've petitioned Prince Bhelen for protection from assassins on the surface, until such a time as I can bring my case before the Landsmeet and clear my family's name."

The ambassador didn't reject her words out of hand, at least. Rìona thought for the first time of Morrigan, and her words long ago. _Men are always willing to believe two things: first, that a woman needs his help, and second, that she finds him attractive._ As always, the memory brought a pang, a sense that she had somehow failed in not securing Morrigan's allegiance.

Deciding to test that theory and see if she couldn't win an ally to her cause, or at least a source of information on the regent's activities, she looked at him with wide eyes and let her mouth tremble slightly, blinking rapidly.

"I'm sorry, my lady," he said quickly, offering her an embroidered and perfumed handkerchief. "That is... not the story we've heard down here in Orzammar. But our information these last months has been unreliable, at best."

"Thank you, ser." She dabbed daintily at her eyes and offered him a tremulous smile. Loghain's man, yes, but not a particularly astute one, if it only took a display of tears to sway him.

His eyes dropped down to her belly, narrowing. "I'm not certain I remember mention of a Rìona Cousland. Were you a daughter then, or the wife of the teyrn's son, Fergus?"

"Daughter." She made a show of tucking his handkerchief into her bodice, drawing his attention to her decolletage. She found herself warming to this gambit, the game she had trained for and had not played in many months. Let him believe her pretty and harmless and besotted with him, until such a time as she decided to convince him otherwise. She capitalized upon the rumors she knew had circulated about her at court. "I'm not surprised you've not heard of me. I was kept quite sheltered, pending an advantageous betrothal." She rested her hand upon her belly, drawing his attention back to it. "Alas, the contract had been, ah, sealed between the signing of the papers and the final vows, and then he was killed."

His eyes warmed considerably as they followed the path of the handkerchief, and Rìona suppressed a grim smile. Clearly he was not a man who was put off by a pregnant woman. Good. All the easier to manipulate him, if he thought there was a chance of getting her into bed.

"So, tell me, ser. What is your purpose here in Orzammar, and what news from the surface do you bring?"

"At present, I'm cooling my heels until this damned business with the succession is settled," he said, preening as Rìona listened with rapt attention. "Word from the surface is long overdue. There was a messenger due from the surface weeks ago, but I don't think the dwarves will let him in. So I have no idea what is required of me here, and they're not letting me send word out until this succession is decided, for fear I will spread rumors of their disorder and unrest. I can't even leave the palace, what with these bloody dwarves attacking each other in the streets. So for now, I'm simply trying to confirm rumors that there are Grey Wardens here in Orzammar. After their betrayal at Ostagar, the regent will want to hear about it if they're seeking aid from the dwarves."

"It's true, I'm afraid." Rìona said, sounding scandalized. "I'm, ah, ashamed to say that the way I got into Orzammar was by bribing the Grey Wardens to bring me with them on their business. I wouldn't have done it, you understand, had my situation not been so dire. Terribly unruly, uncouth lot they were, but they managed to convince the dwarves I was one of them. So, please, if you hear the dwarves refer to me as a Warden, do not disillusion them."

Gainley laughed at that. "You? A Grey Warden? Are the dwarves _blind?_"

"I'm not sure how the Wardens managed to convince them," she demured. "But you don't want to hear that tale. Please, tell me more about your business. I'm sure it must be _thrilling_ to be so deeply entrenched in the affairs of the realm at this tumultuous time. Do you know anything of the regent's plans for Ferelden?" 

* * *

So passed her weeks in Orzammar, as she fretted about Alistair and Zevran, wondering when they would return—if they returned at all. How were they coping? Were they even still alive?

Dear Maker, it hurt even to let herself think such a thing.

She spent her time playing at games of intrigue with Ambassador Gainley, stringing him along with smiles and copious displays of wide-eyed innocence. That he wanted her was unquestionable, and his persistence was becoming wearisome. He was easily led by his lusts, and he'd been without companionship for quite some time, which made him even more demanding. Even her insistence that she was still mourning the loss of her family and intended husband did little to put him off for long.

The only thing that kept her from setting him back sharply was the fact that she didn't know what he was doing here in Orzammar. Was Loghain or Howe seeking aid from the dwarves in the campaign of terror they were conducting against the bannorn? Or was the ambassador attempting to sway the dwarves into believing the Grey Wardens couldn't be trusted, depriving the Wardens of dwarven aid?

Until she could ascertain what his function was, she had to keep him dangling, as irritating as his arrogant insouciance was. He considered the political schism amongst the dwarves to be a trifling inconvenience to his own agenda. He was content to slouch around the palace complaining about the bother it posed for him rather than actually taking any action, and his contempt for the dwarven lower classes was detestable. Altogether, Rìona found him to be repugnant and eagerly anticipated the day she could end her charade.

That day came sooner than she expected.

By her count, it had been over six weeks since Alistair and Zevran had left, when she returned to her rooms after dinner one day to find Gainley there, browsing through the Shaperate scrolls on her desk. She reined in her first instinctive response, which was outraged affront at his audacity, and instead settled for sounding shocked.

"Ambassador! What brings you here?"

He looked caught-out for a moment, then quickly recovered, though not before a shiver of warning shuddered up Rìona's spine.

"I came with a proposition for you, my dear Lady Cousland," he said, straightening. "I've tried to be delicate about this matter, but you've been most inattentive to my hints. So let me be frank. When communication opens up again between Orzammar and Denerim, the intelligence I have regarding the traitorous Grey Wardens and their activities here will no doubt make me a very influential man, once I'm suitably rewarded for my efforts. You, on the other hand, are a fallen woman from a family of traitors bearing a bastard babe. Please. I do not say that to condemn you; I'm merely being... blunt. Even if you clear your family name, your prospects are not nearly as... respectable... as they would once have been, under the circumstances. And certainly not once it becomes known you've kept company with the Grey Wardens."

Rìona ground her teeth, trying to hold back her fury. "I'm very aware of those facts, ser," she replied tightly. "Did you come here to insult me with a recitation of them?"

"Not at all." He offered her an indulgent, patronizing smile, and Rìona braced herself for whatever outrage he was set upon delivering. "Quite the opposite, in fact. My rapport with the dwarves and political contacts here in Orzammar are strong enough that I imagine I'll be assigned here indefinitely once this silly succession of theirs is settled and the queen and the regent have brought the bannorn to heel. The dwarves are a crude lot, but their society is refreshingly open on certain matters. My wife back in Denerim has no desire to relocate here to Orzammar, even if I wanted her presence... which I don't. I have no taste for dwarven women, however, and would prefer to have a human woman as my mistress. Unlike in Ferelden, there would be no shame attached to you, entering into such an arrangement here. Even the prince himself openly acknowledges his mistress. If you prefer, I can wait until your babe is born and you've sent it to be raised by the Chantry, though I have no objection to beginning now, either. It's likely the best offer you're going to get... circumstances being what they are."

"_This_ is your idea of a respectable offer?" Rìona snarled, every muscle in her body quivering with the sheer effrontery of his proposal.

He shrugged carelessly. "Perhaps not to more traditional Fereldan sensibilities, but as I've said, the dwarves are delightfully cosmopolitan about such things. Given your, ah, _situation,_ I had assumed you were, as well." He slunk toward her, leaving Rìona casting about the room with her eyes, looking for the nearest weapon. "Come now. I know you're not entirely immune to such pleasures, considering how you've flirted with me. What sounds more appealing, my dear, a lonely bed on the surface as a shamed woman whom no one wants, or semi-respectable companionship down here?"

Cornered, she had no chance to duck away from him, and she wasn't willing to risk a scuffle that might escalate into violence which might harm her babe.

"Conall!" she called quickly, her voice cut off as the ambassador's lips landed, soft and slimy and repulsive against hers. Shuddering in repugnance, she refused to respond, shoving at his shoulders. His hand came up to knead her breast crudely for a moment, before a loud growl sounded in the room and suddenly the ambassador was on the floor and screaming with seven stone of enraged mabari atop him.

"Conall! Stop!" she commanded before the warhound tore out Gainley's throat, and Conall withdrew, snarling furiously.

"Get out!" Riona spat at the sobbing wretch, utterly unconcerned with her agenda as she stroked Conall, trying to smooth down the rigid, upright fur of his hackles. Whatever intelligence she might have wheedled from the ambassador eventually wasn't nearly worth the price of tolerating his presence. Drawn by the commotion, palace guards swarmed her room, and Rìona issued an imperious command to remove Gainley from her chambers. A conflict ensued between the ambassador's bodyguards and the dwarves, when the dwarven guards were minded to treat him rather roughly for having the audacity to impose upon a woman heavy with child.

When he was gone, she sat alone on the edge of her bed, alternating between petting Conall and wiping her mouth compulsively, as though she could clean away the memory of the ambassador's flaccid lips against hers. Angrily, she dashed away tears of rage. When that failed, she called for a servant to prepare a bath for her and submerged herself in nearly scalding water. She felt filthy. Not since she had allowed herself to be touched by abominations had she felt so powerless and degraded.

Maker help her, he'd spoken the truth.

As outrageous as it had been, she couldn't help but be haunted by Gainley's words. She hadn't really allowed herself to dwell on the realities attached to her situation. The Blight had been far more pressing, but now, with nothing else to occupy her time, she could not escape the truth. The day was quickly approaching when she could no longer avoid a scandal. Once she showed up in Redcliffe looking ready to whelp at any moment, there was bound to be gossip.

Her father had spoken to her many times about the first lesson he learned about pleasure. For someone of their rank, discretion was key. Fereldans were a restrained lot. They didn't care very much what people did so long as private matters remained private. Spreading lewd gossip was likely to bring shame to the teller as much as the object of the tale, and flaunting scandalous behavior was particularly frowned upon as an Orlesian trait. But there was no hiding her indiscretion—it was fully visible, for all the world to see. If somehow rumor had circulated about her mother, as Loghain had hinted all those months ago at Ostagar—and if it had, Rìona suspected Howe was somehow to blame—then Rìona was disgraced.

Unless she wished to use Cailan's letter and make her child a political pawn.

Alistair had told her, back in the ruins in the Brecilian Forest, how he had once made the mistake of disregarding her accomplishments because of her wanton behavior. Others would do much worse. She would be politically discredited for having had a bastard child. Maker forbid, she might actually harm their cause at the Landsmeet with her scandal.

She would have to consult with Arl Eamon about it, when they reached Redcliffe, and prepare herself to swallow a galling quantity of humiliation at his response.

For the first time since Alistair had mentioned it, months ago, Rìona thought about the point he had made, about the disservice her parents may have done her. She had resorted to flirting with Gainley without a second thought, thinking nothing of using her wiles to disarm him. But it had damaged her cause in the end; he had treated her as a _thing_, a commodity. It hadn't given her any power over him, to stir his lusts and use them to manipulate him; instead, it had given him the idea that he had leave to manhandle and insult her at will. The fault had been arrogance and conceit on his part, yes, but perhaps it wouldn't have happened if she had demanded respect in the beginning, rather than attempting to appear weak and harmless to him.

And now there was another adversary in the world who would slander and discredit her.

A rap on her door startled Rìona out of her reverie. She sat up in the deep stone basin, calling out an inquiry.

At the servant's response, all thoughts of Gainley and her situation fled her mind.

"Your companions have returned from the Deep Roads, Warden. The prince said you should be notified immediately."

_Alistair! Zevran!_

The moments it took her to dry herself and dress were agonizingly long. She wondered why Alistair, at least, did not simply come to her, but no doubt Bhelen was holding him up, demanding an accounting of their activities in the Deep Roads. With her hair still damp and tangled from the bath, Rìona rushed through the palace to Bhelen's study.

"Leliana?" Seeing only Leliana and Sten sitting there, a cry of horror began building in Rìona's throat, stealing her breath. She felt her face crumpling, felt the wretched, miserable sense of dread she'd been holding at bay all these weeks threaten to overwhelm her. Any moment now, Leliana would confirm her worst fears and she would begin to scream. "_Where are they?_"

Leliana's eyes widened at the raw urgency in Rìona's tone, but then she quickly smiled a reassurance. Only a very little, though. Overall, she looked quite grim, weary and filthy with travel. "Everyone is alive, or they all were when we parted company—I'm sorry, I don't know how many days ago that was, perhaps a week and a half, or so? Andraste's mercy, Rìona, you look ready to faint! Sten, help her to a chair, and I will tell you what I have been telling Prince Bhelen."

Disbelief warred with relief in Rìona's breast. Suddenly she knew what it was to receive a pardon as one stood upon the gallows with a noose around one's neck.

Alive. They were alive. Both of them.

It was quite some time later when Rìona imperiously interrupted Bhelen's persistent questioning about the search for the Paragon Branka, insisting that Leliana and Sten needed food and rest.

"Nothing my comrades explain about the progress of their quest, to the point at which they parted ways with Warden Alistair and his company, will change the fact that we must wait until the others return to know the outcome," she reasoned firmly. "Anything else can wait until the morrow, your highness. Let me escort them to their chambers and call for supper to be brought to them, and we will reconvene for a full accounting in the morning."

Clearly disgruntled, Bhelen gave his assent and excused them, instructed a servant to escort them to the chambers in the wing Rìona inhabited, chambers that his chamberlain had ordered prepared upon Leliana and Sten's arrival. Rìona ordered the servant to fetch them supper trays and left Sten at his door, intent on accompanying Leliana to her room. Then she turned, and called out an instant before Sten's door shut, "Oh, Sten, I'm sorry I forgot to mention this sooner. I spent some of my time these past weeks following the information we received about your sword. Asala was purchased by the dwarf, Dwyn, in Redcliffe. As soon as the rest of our company is back safely from the Deep Roads, we will get it for you."

Sten looked stunned at the announcement. "I... did not think you had remembered."

"Of course I did. I gave you my word we would try to find your sword. I'm sorry it has taken us so long to get answers for you. I swear before we depart Redcliffe for Denerim, Asala will be in your hand once more, whatever I must do to see it done."

"Thank you... kadan."

She bowed her head with a small smile. "You're welcome. Rest well, and I'll see you in the morning."

When Leliana's door had closed behind them, she turned and hugged her friend fiercely. "Everyone was well when you left them? Truly?"

"Alistair was _fine,_" Leliana said with a touch of amusement, giving Rìona a squeeze. "Well, perhaps not fine. I don't think any of us could truly call ourselves fine after we encountered the broodmother. But he was alive and mostly uninjured."

"And what of Zevran?" She couldn't force herself to make the question seem casual.

Leliana drew back, blinking slowly at Rìona. "Ah. I see. Zevran was well, also. I think Alistair would be coping much worse with everything, if not for the fact that Zevran has been helping him. But you will see for yourself, soon enough. They had to have been close to finding Branka. It could be merely days before they return."

"I hope you're right," Rìona murmured fretfully. She left Leliana when the servants arrived to prepare her bath and deliver her supper tray, retreating to the privacy of her own chamber. Absently, she straightened the jumbled scrolls upon the desk that Ambassador Gainley had been browsing through earlier that day, too distracted to even be indignant at his barely concealed snooping.

Merely days, Leliana had said. Possibly. There was no guarantee what they may have encountered after Leliana left their company.

In some ways, she longed for Zevran's return even more than Alistair's. With Alistair, at least she had been able to bid him a proper farewell and assure him of her love. Her farewell with Zevran had been stilted and awkward.

Their reunion, she vowed, would not be. Whatever Alistair's feelings on the matter, he knew the truth now. He could accept it or not, as he chose. But these weeks of waiting and worrying had been a revelation for Rìona. She might have lost Zevran, without ever letting him know how she truly felt. Never again would she take that chance. She would not hold back from greeting Zevran as he deserved to be greeted, for shame or fear of how Alistair would react.

No more denial. No more masks. No more hiding.

When they came back, things were going to be different.


	46. Chapter Forty Six: Primacy

There was little time for worrying about the new... understanding... between Alistair and Zevran as they left Bownammar and closed in on the Anvil of the Void and Oghren's mad wife, the Paragon Branka. First they had to exterminate the darkspawn Branka had tried to use to disarm the Paragon Caridin's ancient traps, and they had to find a way through those traps themselves. It was a harrowing final few days, with a number of close calls. They slept little, fearful of what might spring out at them, and spent most of their time trying to puzzle out the next challenge. Wynne's knowledge of the arcane came in handy, as did Zevran's ability to detect and disarm traps. Alistair wondered if he'd have made it through at all, without them.

It didn't make it any easier when they learned the truth of what the Anvil of the Void actually did, and what Branka's plans were for it. Then Alistair found himself in the miserable position of having to kill Oghren's wife, while Zevran argued in favor of her case.

Unable to believe that a man who had once been sold on the slave market was arguing in favor of killing people and entrapping them in stone bodies whose will was dictated by a control rod, Alistair's frustrations erupted again as he whirled on Zevran.

"Have you learnt _nothing_ from Rìona, in all this time, about simple decency?" Alistair snapped incredulously, irritated that Zevran would choose now, of all times, to remind them just how callous he could be. "Why don't we put _you_ on the blighted thing and see how you like being enslaved as a golem!"

Zevran smiled, that smile Alistair was learning he gave when he was trying to distract or appeal to someone with thoughts of sex. "Surely you wouldn't waste my beauty in such a way," he scoffed.

Alistair glared at him, unimpressed by his flirtation. "If it meant getting out of this damned place just that much sooner? _Never doubt it._"

They stared at each other for a moment, and finally Zevran laughed. It wasn't quite the reaction Alistair had hoped his attempt to intimidate Zevran would garner, but it seemed to do the trick. "Oh ho, I see! Well, perhaps it is a better idea to destroy the anvil," he conceded. "By all means, carry on."

Late that night, as Oghren mourned his wife's death with a truly epic quantity of liquor and in the distance Caridin hammered away upon the crown he had promised to make for Alistair's chosen candidate, Zevran approached Alistair.

"I must say, my friend, I underestimated you," he announced casually. It was the first time Zevran had come to him since the night after the Broodmother. It wasn't dark and they weren't far enough from the others for true privacy, but despite that fact, Alistair felt a shudder run through him as he recalled Zevran's promise. This might not be his intended seduction, but somehow Alistair suspected Zevran wasn't letting that vow slide.

With the thrill of victory and the rush of battle lust still singing in his veins, Alistair found himself wishing they _did_ have a measure of privacy.

"How so?" Alistair asked after a moment, with hard-won nonchalance.

"This... forceful side of your nature. I never imagined you had it in you. Very _manly._"

Wynne was sleeping some distance away, Oghren was too drunk to notice anything happening around him, Shale was off conversing with Caridin as he worked, and the echo of Caridin's hammering and Shale's voice above it was enough that Alistair doubted he and Zevran could be overheard. Nonetheless, Alistair felt too self-conscious in their presence to let himself pursue the implied invitation to flirt back.

Instead, he muttered, "Yes, well, I promised myself a while back that I was finished being pushed around."

"Oh?" Apparently the response did nothing to deter Zevran. "I find I rather like being _pushed around_ on the odd occasion."

"Is that so?" Alistair's hands clenched at his sides as he remembered that final moment in the darkness, driving Zevran against the wall and kissing him. His determination not to respond to Zevran's innuendo began to crumple. "You and Rìona have that in common, then."

"So we do. But then... I also very much like being the one who _pushes_."

Another mental image, of being the one driven against the wall, acquiescent as Zevran's clever hands had their way with him. Alistair squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, fighting against the impulse to seek out some secluded nook and bring an end to this game.

He'd been a fool to assume that the presence of others meant Zevran wouldn't carry out the seduction he had promised. He was doing precisely that, without laying a finger on Alistair.

"I am a man of many tastes," Zevran concluded with a smirk. "Much like yourself, I suspect."

Zevran's gaze dropped pointedly to the bulge in Alistair's breeches. "Ahh, but for want of a bath, perhaps I would _taste_ you now and confirm my suspicions."

Alistair didn't know whether to try to persuade Zevran to pursue that line of thought, or cringe in embarrassment at his filthy state. This was definitely not the place for a tryst, nonetheless, Alistair stood there, heavy and aching and oh-so-very _tempted._

"I'd highly recommend seeking out fresh water before long," Zevran concluded, stepping back. It wasn't until that moment that Alistair realized he'd drawn closer to begin with, and pitched his voice low for privacy. "Our water skins are nearly empty, after all."

Zevran walked away, leaving Alistair speechless, breathless, hard and nearly shaking with lust. "It should be interesting, to see who comes out on top in this little battle of machismo," Zevran tossed over his shoulder.

Unable to formulate a response that didn't involve dragging Zevran off to a corner for another quick and furtive session of wanking, Alistair conceded that the first round, at least, went to the assassin. 

* * *

The second round, he determined, wouldn't.

After matters with the Anvil of the Void had been resolved, they made good time back toward Orzammar. It had taken them over six weeks to find the Anvil of the Void, most of the final week having been spent navigating Caridin's traps. Now that the way had been cleared, and the archdemon had led so much of the darkspawn horde toward the surface, the return trip looked to take a little over a third of that time, and Alistair was anxious to be back and see Rìona again.

Zevran's attempts to keep him in a constant state of low arousal with his flirtations and thinly-veiled innuendo were doing nothing to help his impatience. It was as though Zevran were daring him, seeing how far he could tease before Alistair acted. Which left Alistair torn. He could, of course, give in and accost Zevran, which was no doubt exactly what Zevran wanted. Or he could attempt to hold out, which seemed rather futile and self-punishing. As unappealing as the latter option was, it was at least the one which left him feeling marginally in control.

Thank the Maker Rìona hadn't toyed with him in such a way, or Alistair might have gone mad. He hadn't truly understood what she meant when she spoke of using sex as a weapon, until he felt its keen edge turned against him. He also hadn't understood just how _patient_ she had been with him, allowing him to court her without pressing him as he took things at his own pace. Zevran was allowing him no room for hesitation or ambivalence; either he was going to comply with this arrangement, or he was not. There was no middle ground.

Fortunately, Alistair had set his mind on complying. He just wasn't certain he was willing to do so strictly on terms Zevran alone had dictated. It was almost as if Zevran, for all his air of nonchalance, felt compelled to keep pushing. It made Alistair wonder just how strong Zevran's will actually was. Was he just trying to get the upper hand? Would his impulse-control crumple, if Alistair pushed back?

They were nearly halfway back to Orzammar, branching south of Ortan Thaig toward Cadash Thaig, rather than north toward Orzammar, before Alistair decided that point needed to be made. Zevran had spent the evening teasing Alistair about giving him a tattoo, complete with olive oil massage, thinking to discomfit Alistair. But Alistair merely smiled and shook his head, biding his time.

Zevran's watch was first. Alistair waited, lying still on his bedroll, until Zevran had awakened Oghren for his watch shift, and when the dwarf had shuffled off, grumbling, down the tunnel leading to the cavern where they were camped, Alistair rose. He could feel Zevran's eyes upon him, but he refused to meet them as he walked away in the opposite direction from where Oghren and Shale would be keeping watch. If he looked at Zevran, no doubt Zevran would interpret it as a concession, or an invitation, and Alistair didn't want that. He wanted to see if Zevran was curious enough to follow Alistair on his own initiative. And so, he walked away beyond the campfire and waited, his eyes adapting to the darkness until he could see vague shapes and shadows, as he leaned against a large piece of fallen masonry that had once been part of an outpost building inhabited by the guards of Ortan Thaig.

He didn't have to wait long.

Zevran's approach was deliberately loud; Alistair knew very well that he could move silently as a wraith when he desired to do so. Clearly he wanted Alistair to know he was coming.

"Are you desiring privacy, my friend?"

"No." Alistair smiled in the darkness, pleased to have been proven correct in his guess. "I was expecting you."

Humor colored Zevran's tone. "Ah, so I am walking into your trap! And here I almost thought it was you who were walking into mine."

"I thought a bath was a prerequisite for whatever you plan next?" Alistair needled slightly. He circled around Zevran slowly, until Zevran was between him and the large stone block against which he had been leaning. He felt, rather than saw, the tension that shivered through Zevran. For all that he claimed to like being "pushed around" the assassin _didn't_ like being cornered, trapped, he didn't like having Alistair at his back without knowing what his intentions were. Alistair half-expected Zevran to turn to face him, but Zevran was too busy pretending to be unconcerned and nonchalant. "Or are we simply going to keep groping each other from time to time, all the way back to Orzammar?"

"Groping has its coarse and limited rewards," Zevran replied, still sounding cool and amused. "If that is what you seek, I am certainly game."

"You're always _game_ aren't you?" Alistair asked quietly, stepping close to Zevran, until his body just barely brushed Zevran's back. "Sometimes I wonder what's game and what's real. Answer me one question: is this just about you finding a way to be close to Rìona?"

Zevran stiffened for a moment, then relaxed with a chuckle, and moved back against Alistair minutely. "That's a fair question. I can see why you would suspect that. But—as much to my surprise as yours, I'm sure—no, it is not. We have struck up an interesting friendship, you and I, haven't we? And as relieved as I am that this conveniently offers a solution to our dilemma, it has," he pressed even closer to Alistair, until the bulge in Alistair's breeches was nestled against the small of Zevran's back, "_much_ more compelling benefits, as well. This is not a development I would ever have proposed, but that is only because I never imagined you would actually seek it. I had rather thought you would simply secretly yearn for it and never admit to more."

Secretly yearn— Irritated, Alistair gave a frustrated growl next to Zevran's ear, and grabbed Zevran's waist, pulling Zevran back as he pushed his erection against him insistently. "I'm not _quite_ the prude you assume I am."

Zevran moved back against Alistair, and for a moment Alistair had a hard time remembering precisely why he was here, if not for that. Touch. Pressure. Contact. The promise of release.

"My mistake," Zevran practically purred, not sounding the least bit contrite. His self-satisfied tone helped Alistair remember his purpose. He was _not_ going to be passively seduced, like all the marks Zevran so frequently spoke of.

_Maker's breath!_ Alistair went still for a moment as he realized what was happening here. This wasn't just about deciding who was in control. Well, it was, but that was only a part of it. Alistair realized, he was doing the same thing with Zevran that he'd done with Rìona by courting her. He was trying to distinguish himself, set himself apart.

Sweet Andraste, what did it mean, that this... development... with Zevran meant enough to him, that he felt the need to do that?

He might have been frozen by the thought, struck dumb, but there was Zevran, pressed against him, and introspection would just have to wait. He was deliberately rough as he shoved Zevran forward, so that he truly was trapped between Alistair's body and the massive stonework slab before them. He reached around for the laces of Zevran's leather cod-flap as he simultaneously bent his knees to nestle the hard ridge of his cock along the groove bisecting Zevran's backside beneath the taut leather of his breeches.

"Ah, groping it is," Zevran said with a smirk evident in his voice.

"Shut up," Alistair replied pithily, grinding himself against Zevran hard as his hand wrapped around Zevran's length and began to stroke.

"As you say." It was rewarding, to hear Zevran's smooth voice a little ragged, a little strained. Rewarding to break some of that cool, casual façade. It didn't matter that Alistair's own voice was getting a bit breathless, or that he was rampant and straining under the linen of his breeches and braies, rubbing so intimately along Zevran's ass. It didn't matter; he didn't have to be unaffected to carry his point.

He stroked himself against Zevran's body over and over, as Zevran moved in rhythm with him, alternating between thrusting into the sheath of Alistair's hand and pressing hard against Alistair's length. The pressure felt good, though it wasn't nearly enough to put Alistair over the edge. No, he could do this all night.

And that was the point.

"You know, you're actually laboring under a few false assumptions about me," Alistair remarked when Zevran's body had relaxed still further against his own, when he began moaning softly in time with the strokes of Alistair's hand.

"Oh?" There it was. A note of need, a hint that the masks were coming off and Zevran was no longer putting on a show. That Zevran _could_ do so, even now, Alistair didn't doubt. But he wasn't, and that was a very good thing.

"Sure." He increased the rate at which his hand pumped up and down Zevran's shaft, until Zevran's head fell back and his neck strained, vibrating around a stifled groan.

"True, the monastery didn't teach me the sort of things you and Rìona know. I'm never going to be great at games of teasing, or able to seduce someone with just a few words and a single look."

Zevran began to thrust urgently in time to Alistair's strokes, giving a strangled gasp each time Alistair passed his palm over the slick head of his cock.

Alistair's lips brushed the point of Zevran's ear as he murmured, "After all, they were absolute death on lewd behavior. But they _did_ teach me one rather important thing."

Zevran swelled in his hand, hardening still further. He moaned and spent against the stone in the darkness, slumping against it afterward. He hunched there for a moment, shuddering, until he finally recovered enough to ask breathlessly, "And what is that?"

"Iron-hard self-control." Alistair couldn't keep the satisfaction from his tone as he pulled away from Zevran, readjusted himself, and walked away.

He was hard and aching, yes, but that was nothing he wasn't used to. The point had been made; if Zevran thought to manipulate him or drive him to desperation with his flirtation and teasing, he had a long, long way to go before he reached his mark.

Alistair was already lying on his bedroll, his erection subsiding and sleep creeping up on him in drowsy waves, when Zevran returned to the circle they had made with their bedrolls around the fire and lay down on his own.

"Well played, my friend," Alistair heard him murmur, and fell asleep smiling in satisfaction. 

* * *

There was fresh water in abundance in Cadash Thaig. And intact houses that afforded privacy. And an utter lack of darkspawn, once the isolated patrol they encountered upon their arrival had been dealt with.

It had tweaked his impatience to take time out from their return journey to come here, for all that he owed it to Shale to honor her request. They would never have made it through Caridin's traps without her, for she had been the one who disarmed the room full of poisonous gas. Oghren assured him it would only add two or three days to the trip, but it was enough to grate on his nerves. He wanted to get back to Orzammar, back to Rìona, back to ending the Blight, and this was just another delay.

Those concerns fled, though, when Wynne looked around the astonishingly lush thaig and started enthusing about the prospect of a bath. Then, Alistair's anxiety took on an entirely new tenor, as his eyes slid to Zevran. Zevran, whose expression was bland and shuttered until the moment he quirked an inquiring eyebrow ever so slightly at Alistair, and commented that a bath would indeed be lovely.

Alistair swallowed hard, and conceded gruffly that a bath would be nice.

And so he found himself alone in one of the small houses they had chosen to sleep in—ostensibly to avoid any further deepstalker attacks and to have a night free of Oghren's snores. While his clothing dried, he was wrapped in nothing but one of the blankets from his bedroll. He still shivered from the frigid water of the underground stream in which he had bathed.

Zevran would show up, that much was absolutely certain. They had dragged this out long enough. Another time, Alistair might have felt the need to analyze this course to death, but he resolutely pushed that impulse aside. There was too much riding on this to cripple himself with questions and doubts.

He wanted Zevran. Alistair made himself admit it, in the privacy of his mind. And that was enough, for now. Yes, that was strange and unexpected and not anything he would have imagined for himself, once upon a time. But it was there and it was real, and Alistair was _done_ with hiding from himself and protesting simply because a notion didn't fit into his tidy worldview.

Moreover, he _liked_ Zevran, and that was, perhaps, the most important point. He might not _need_ Zevran the way he needed Rìona, but nonetheless, he found himself increasingly discontented with the notion of trying to share a life with Rìona, knowing his happiness came at the expense of Zevran's misery.

So he would do this, reservations and fears be damned. He would do this because it was too important not to, and because he simply wanted it.

"And what, I wonder, does that scowl portend?"

Alistair nearly jumped out of his skin, so silent had Zevran's arrival been. Had he done that on purpose?

"You could have announced your presence," Alistair said after a moment, forcing himself to squash the flare of irritability that inevitably came after being startled.

"Yes, I suppose I could have." Zevran didn't seem terribly apologetic as he stood there, still damp from his own bath and wearing only his leather breeches. Not the filthy, stained ones he'd been wearing all these weeks in the Deep Roads, but another pair that he had clearly been holding onto for when he needed a clean change of clothes. The ridge of his hipbones was visible above the waist of the breeches, the muscles of his abdomen cascading down, tapering between the hollows before his hips.

Maker. He really did have those tattoos on more places that just his face and back. The way they disappeared below the point where his skin ended and his breeches began seemed almost like an invitation to follow where they led.

Alistair swallowed hard. He was still too new to admitting his attraction to Zevran to really be comfortable with just how appealing the sight of him barely clothed was. But Zevran's entire posture was wary, guarded. Alistair realized Zevran _had_ meant to startle him, to throw him off his stride.

Why?

"I was beginning to wonder if you would come."

"I thought perhaps you might like some time alone with your thoughts, before I came, and so I waited until I was certain Wynne was asleep and Oghren deep in his ale." Zevran stepped into the stone-walled cottage and shut the heavy door behind him. Oghren was in the cottage next door, and Wynne in the one beyond that, with Shale patrolling the thaig outside, ready to alert them in case Alistair's sense that there were no more darkspawn within days of this place proved false. Their privacy was as complete as it could possibly be, under the circumstances.

There was something cautiously predatory in the way Zevran moved toward him and then stopped, just out of reach, and it mirrored Alistair's own sense of chary expectation. They were... circling each other, he realized. Not literally, of course, though Alistair realized he did indeed feel the impulse to move, to keep Zevran in front of him, at a careful distance. Like two mabari, they were sniffing one another, trying to get a sense of each other's intentions before letting down their guard.

"You don't need to tiptoe around me quite so much, you know."

"No?" Zevran's brows arched slightly. "I have no reason to be concerned you may have changed your mind?"

"If I had, we wouldn't be standing here," Alistair replied shortly. "But if you doubt me so much that you need to play games rather than coming at me straight, maybe this isn't such a good idea. I'm not one of your _marks_, so quit acting like you need a strategy to get to me."

Zevran stiffened for a moment, long enough for Alistair to regret his impatient tone. But just as suddenly, his posture changed, softened. His guarded expression gave way to a wry grin and a shake of his head.

"Ah! Between her trust and your honesty, I never had a chance," he murmured, almost to himself. "Deadly innocents, the pair of you."

This was the Zevran he liked, Alistair realized. When the masks were laid aside and the real man appeared. The Zevran who had been so tender and protective of Rìona, and who had confided in Alistair with unexpected frankness.

Seizing that thought, Alistair quickly closed the few steps between them and grabbed Zevran, kissing him with more determination than eroticism, before the moment of honesty had passed and another mask fell into place.

Zevran met him, hungrily, grasping at him, and Alistair yielded, just a bit. Enough to give Zevran some room to take the lead. Zevran's lips pulled at his, his tongue cajoling until Alistair was gasping against his mouth. When he pulled back, Zevran's teeth nibbled at the hard ridge down the front of Alistair's throat with a delicacy that was both maddening and intensely pleasant. Alistair let his head fall back, let himself _feel_ the skill in that touch, that kiss.

He barely noticed when the blanket he had wrapped around himself slipped away, until he realized his hardening cock was trapped against the rippling muscles of Zevran's flat abdomen. He nudged forward, seeking more pressure.

"What is it you want?" Zevran murmured, dipping his head to lick Alistair's nipple, making Alistair groan.

"I—oh, _Maker_..." Those lean, nimble fingers closed around him, stroking. It took him a moment to recover the ability to speak. "I haven't done this before... needless to say." He gasped, thrusting softly into the caress, but managed not to stammer or blush. Strangely, he wasn't ashamed to admit his ignorance. Bravado, determination and instinct had carried him this far, but still. "I'm really not sure... what to do. Besides the obvious, of course."

"And what is it you think will be so different from what you've already experienced?" Zevran released his shaft and gripped Alistair's hips, drawing him closer, pressing them together as his hands lightly kneaded Alistair's backside.

"I don't know." Alistair fought the urge to grab Zevran and grind against him.

"It is much the same with another man as it is with a woman, at its most basic," Zevran said calmly. "Seek what feels good, and avoid what does not. The rest... it works itself out somehow. How did you find your way along with our sweet Rìona?"

Alistair laughed, a sound which turned strangled as Zevran began sucking on the tendon between his neck and shoulder. "I turned into an absolute savage and practically ravished her, before I could give myself a chance to over-think things."

Zevran chuckled. "So that is what you meant when you called yourself a brute. Well, it has worked for us down here, so far; I see no reason you should not continue. I am certainly not opposed to a bit of rough handling."

Alistair shuddered again, feeling the control he had gloated about begin to snap. "I'm starting to sense a pattern in the sort of people I get tangled up with," he growled and grabbed Zevran's shoulders, jerking him into another kiss.

It was easier to give in and allow his impulses free rein. Easier not to think, to just touch and kiss. He wasn't a complete novice anymore, at least, and it came far more naturally now, to disregard the fear that he might be doing something wrong, than it once had.

Alistair didn't know when both his hands dropped to cup Zevran's backside through the leather of his breeches and tug him flush against his body, but it felt good. He hadn't even realized he wanted to have his hands on that taut, flexing muscle until it was within his grasp. He felt Zevran swelling against his thigh, filling out his codflap. Alistair ground against him roughly, swallowing his low moan.

When Alistair wrenched himself away from Zevran's mouth and seized the point of his ear gently between his teeth, Zevran's response was extraordinary. As though a lever had been pulled, the tension went out of Zevran's body and he practically wrapped himself around Alistair. He muttered something in Antivan that sounded astonishingly like a prayer when Alistair's tongue dipped into the shell of his ear, and craned his neck, silently offering Alistair better access.

Alistair obliged, thrilled to feel Zevran give himself over, to hear the sounds he made, growing more pleased, more needful. Sucking on Zevran's ear led to the irresistible impulse to taste him more completely; the slender, corded neck, the lean, muscled shoulders. He sucked on the ridge just above his collarbone, the same spot he so often found himself marking on Rìona. Burying his face in Zevran's neck gave him the same sense of being enveloped by his scent as it did with Rìona, and though the scent of him was different, it was no less pleasant.

He wanted to taste Zevran, Alistair realized, surprised at himself for how easy and compelling the notion was. He lifted his head from Zevran's neck to kiss him, while his shaking fingers began to pull at the laces of Zevran's codflap.

There was nothing ceremonious about the way he thrust his hands down the back of Zevran's breeches once they were loosened, cupping his bare skin just as he had done through the leather. Zevran didn't appear to object, if his low groan was any indication. Alistair began to shove, working the breeches down Zevran's narrow hips while his lips traveled down the length of Zevran's neck to his shoulders once more, and from there to his chest, following the tantalizing trails of those simple, bold lines inked into his skin. Once the breeches reached Zevran's thighs, it became more difficult, the leather too snug, and Alistair knelt, fighting urgently with the leather until it slid off Zevran's legs to pool at his ankles.

And then Zevran was bare before him, for the first time in sufficient light that Alistair could actually _see_ him. Apparently, he noted with an unexpected flash of humor, there was no truth to the rumors that elves were proportional with their shorter, more slender, bodies.

"What is it that makes you smirk like that?" Zevran asked, and Alistair lifted his gaze to find Zevran watching him intently.

That... might not necessarily be the best observation to make, right now, Alistair thought, and declined to answer, distracting Zevran by taking his length in hand and stroking firmly. The hood of skin glided back, revealing the glistening tip, the flaring crown. With one of his hands at Zevran's hip, he could feel the quivering tension in Zevran's body, the eager expectation. The deep, musky, somehow spicy scent Alistair was coming to associate with Zevran surrounded him, drew him closer.

His tongue darted out to sample that shining wetness, and it was pleasant. He wanted more of it, pressed his tongue against the slit to coax more flavor from Zevran. Zevran's hand fell to Alistair's shoulder, not gripping or pulling or guiding, but merely... waiting. Only when Alistair opened his mouth and took Zevran inside did the hand tighten slightly, as a stream of Antivan slid from Zevran's lips on a single long sigh.

He quickly began to understand why Rìona enjoyed doing this so much. He might be on his knees, but there was power here. He felt it in the tremor that occasionally shook Zevran, in the low, urgent sounds he made as he gave uncontrolled nudges with his hips. Alistair's efforts were awkward at first, as he tried to emulate what Rìona had done to him so many times. An attempt to take Zevran too deeply into his mouth was very nearly disastrous, and Zevran chuckled.

"That comes with practice," he said, his voice tight and strangled despite his humor. "I will show you sometime."

And then humor gave way to pleasure, the chuckle disintegrating into a long, ragged groan as Alistair wrapped his lips fully around Zevran's shaft and sucked hard.

"_¡Sangre del Hacedor!_" he muttered, as Alistair seized his hips and began to work his mouth up and down on Zevran's cock. It was almost easy to forget the throbbing of his own need, rigid and rampant, rising up from his body as he knelt there between Zevran's feet, with the scent of Zevran, the taste of him, his reactions to each pull of Alistair's mouth. His fingers flexed on Zevran's backside, massaging as he licked and sucked. Remembering Rìona's words about Zevran's preferences, Alistair experimentally ran his fingers lightly along the crevice of Zevran's ass, and drew back, startled, when he found the skin of his cleft slick with oil.

Zevran offered him a small smile as Alistair looked up at him. "It never hurts to be prepared," he remarked by way of explanation.

Suddenly it wasn't so easy to ignore his own arousal, as his body tightened and surged in approval of the notion, of finding his release buried deep within Zevran. Perhaps he should have been troubled by the presumption, but instead he was simply relieved. It made it easier, to know which course Zevran wanted matters to take.

Thankfully, Zevran didn't seem to mind the fact that Alistair's brain quit working almost entirely, paralyzed by that single idea. "Lie down, my friend," he said with amusement heavy in his voice, Nodding jerkily, Alistair obeyed, reclining on the bedroll as Zevran kicked his breeches aside and retrieved a small flask from the belt pouch Alistair hadn't even noticed upon the floor.

Kneeling between Alistair's legs, he bent, and his incredibly soft, fine hair brushed Alistair's belly as Zevran lightly swirled his tongue around the head of Alistair's cock. With a ragged moan, Alistair thrust toward the sensation, moaning again, bereft, when Zevran pulled away.

"Relax," he murmured, leaving Alistair's shaft entirely to lick and nibble lightly at the skin of Alistair's belly just below his navel. He worked his way up Alistair's torso, kissing and sucking up his ribs, to his neck. By the time Zevran reached Alistair's mouth, he lay flush upon Alistair.

Zevran kissed him deeply, plunging his tongue into Alistair's mouth as their bodies slid against one another. Alistair pushed upward against Zevran's weight and when Zevran shifted, their cocks rubbed against one another. It was a strangely intense thought, to realize that was what he was feeling, and Alistair sought more of it, until they were rocking, thrusting against each other, grinding together.

By the time Zevran pulled away to reach for his flask, Alistair was shaking, and they were both slick with sweat. Alistair didn't think he imagined the tremor in Zevran's hands as he poured oil into his palm and slicked it down Alistair's shaft. And then he was straddling Alistair's hips and lowering himself slowly, carefully, and...

"Andraste's mercy!" Alistair grated, at the same instant that Zevran hissed, "_¡Piedad de Andraste!_"

Zevran was still for a long, merciful moment, his chest heaving as he panted above Alistair. It was a good thing, too, for if he hadn't been, it would have been over far too soon. The heat, that tight, gripping pressure, nearly overwhelmed Alistair. He'd been away from Rìona for months, with only that one encounter with Zevran in the darkness after the broodmother for relief. If Zevran had moved, before he wrestled his will back into line, it would have been over in an instant.

Seeking to distract himself, he studied Zevran's intent, slightly strained expression. "Are you all right?" Alistair asked in a harsh rasp.

Zevran nodded quickly. "It has just been a while, yes?" he sighed, beginning to relax slightly. "It is easy to forget, how good it can be..."

Zevran's voice caught and hitched when Alistair shifted slightly. His head snapped back, and he made a sound that fell somewhere between a growl and a sigh.

And then Zevran began to _move_, and Alistair realized just how desperately fragile his own control was becoming.

"Yes, like that," Zevran urged when Alistair lifted his hips slightly to meet Zevran's movements, thrusting into that clenching tightness. Without faltering, Zevran took his own rigid cock in his oily hand and began to pump, hard, deep strokes in time with the rise and fall of his body up and down Alistair's shaft. Alistair's hands gripped Zevran's hips with bruising force, fixated on the sight of that sliding hand, on the slapping sound Zevran's strokes made when they hit his belly. He stopped trying to move on Alistair as he began to swell, the head of his shaft a deep red as it thrust through the ring of his fist. It was Alistair who had to pick up the rhythm, his hips snapping up with almost violent force, seeking more as the world began to unravel around him.

The tension around Alistair's cock seized and rippled. Zevran gave a final, choked grunt and his seed jetted hotly across Alistair's belly, and Alistair was lost, following him over the edge, surging and throbbing deep within Zevran.

When the flashing lights and red haze cleared from Alistair's vision and the roaring in his ears ceased, he opened his eyes to see Zevran give a shuddering sigh. Zevran lifted himself off Alistair and sprawled on the blanket beside him with something less than his customary grace.

If it were Rìona, Alistair would have pulled her close and held her, but... he and Zevran weren't like that. He liked and respected Zevran, yes, but that level of affection wasn't there. Not yet, anyway.

Still, there was something fascinating about the ridges of lean muscle and lines of ink beneath Zevran's skin, as his chest tapered down to his abdomen, and without thought, Alistair reached out to run a finger down that cascading line, seeking to explore it and sate his curiosity, only for Zevran to flinch away with a shiver.

Zevran... was ticklish?

Alistair grinned and stored that fact away for future investigation.

It was a long moment, punctuated by deep, panting gasps from them both, before Alistair spoke.

"I can't help but wonder how Rìona is going to react to all this."

Zevran laughed softly. "With all her usual charm, no doubt. She can hardly be outraged, under the circumstances."

"No, I don't expect she would be," Alistair replied, smiling. "But she always made a point of mentioning how her mother and father never took lovers without each other's approval. I... Well, needless to say, I didn't get her permission. Like you said, under the circumstances, I doubt she'll object much, if at all. But it probably would have been... good form... to have her approval. Not that I could have foreseen this happening."

Zevran grinned wickedly. "Then we shall throw ourselves upon her tender mercy... and hope she has very little to spare!"

Alistair gave himself over to the bizarre and convoluted humor of it all. It was a rather absurd thing to worry about, he supposed.

After another moment, Zevran sobered. "I must ask... why this solution to our little dilemma?"

Alistair sat up, and when he did so Zevran produced a damp cloth—from where, Alistair had no idea. He wiped his stomach and groin clean and then grabbed the blanket he'd been wrapped in after he'd bathed. With the sweat of exertion cooling on his skin, he felt slightly chilled in the damp air of the thaig. He covered himself and lay back down, rolling up on his side to face Zevran, who waved him off when he offered to share the blanket.

"In answer to your question," Alistair said when he had settled again, "I can't really say. It's not anything I had planned. When we left Orzammar, I was most of the way to deciding to... share, I guess?... if that was what it would take. I was even starting to enjoy the idea of watching the two of you together. But then something you said while we were down here stuck with me, about how Rìona would have barely enough attention for one man, much less two, after the babe is born. I could see us vying for her attention, snarling at each other like two mabari with a bone. Or maybe it would have just been me, feeling insecure that there wasn't enough of her to go around, and growing resentful of the time she spent with you that she wasn't spending with me. It just seemed like it would be a disaster, if we ended up struggling for primacy."

Zevran hummed thoughtfully. "It has never been my habit to question my pleasures too deeply, but I find there is too much at stake here not to do so now. Assuming we all survive this Blight, what happens then?"

"I don't know." Alistair sighed deeply. "What I want and what's likely to happen are two different things. What I _want_ to do is take Rìona and the babe—and you now, I suppose—somewhere far away and retire in obscurity. Maybe some nice, modest freehold where no one has any idea that I'm King Maric's bastard or Rìona is the last of the Cousland line. I could marry her, give her babe a name, make a home for us all... But it's a dream. I know it's never going to happen. The world won't let us do that.

"Arl Eamon wants to make me king. I hate the idea, but if I don't play along, he says he'll have to support Loghain. Which means Rìona and I would still be branded traitors, still be hunted, with even fewer allies than we have now. If I could forget my duty as a Grey Warden, maybe we could run away, to some other country where no one cares that we're supposedly the Grey Wardens who betrayed Ferelden and killed the king. But I can't do that. We've got to end this Blight. Besides, even if I weren't Maric's bastard, she's still the last Cousland. She'll want to reclaim her home, be the teyrna, give her babe his birthright. And now there's this letter that my brother wrote—I left it back in Orzammar with Rìona, in case I didn't come back from the Deep Roads, or I'd show it to you—acknowledging Rìona and her babe. With that document... everyone would know Cailan intended her to be queen, and that her babe is the Theirin heir. No one would argue if I were to wed her and make the babe my heir. All our problems would be neatly solved. But there's the question of where you would fit into all that."

"Me?" Zevran scoffed. "A king can never go wrong, having an assassin in his pocket. In Antiva, the king is usually the one with the most powerful Crow cell at his disposal. I can see many possibilities, if I were to stay in such circumstances. So long as it produces the appropriate issue, there are few things which receive less scrutiny than the activities of a king's bedchamber, yes? So... yes, that could all work out rather nicely, as far as I am concerned."

"So you think I should do it?"

"I cannot tell you what you should do," Zevran said seriously. "I have said before I think our lovely Rìona would make a terrifyingly good queen, and I think neither of us wants to see her disgraced. You _must_ give the babe your name. On that point I am quite insistent. I would offer my own, but that would scarcely be less shameful for her, or to the child, than if the babe is born a bastard. An elf? An assassin, no less? No. She would not mind, but others would. It must be you."

Astonished, Alistair stared. "_That's_ why you stepped aside?"

"Among other reasons, yes. I do not know how it is here in Ferelden, but in Antiva, life is very harsh for a fallen woman. A man of any worth does right by his lady, if he possibly can. I will not let her be shamed. So... for you to become king and use this document? It seems the best option, on any number of fronts."

"Yes, it is. All I have to do to take it is... become something I never wanted to be." Alistair grimaced. "It hardly seems fair to you, though, to live in our shadows, sneaking around."

Zevran shrugged carelessly. "I was born to a whore and bought as a slave, trained to kill by those who cared nothing for whether I lived or died. To be paramour to royalty? I see no shame in that. There are no perfect solutions, my friend. If you are waiting for one, you will be waiting a very long time, indeed. But... it is your choice, of course."

His choice.

Yes, it _was_ his choice, despite the circumstances which dictated it. Rìona had never attempted to press him on this matter, one way or the other, despite the fact that surely this same option had occurred to her. She, who had so much more at stake here than any of them, had left it in Alistair's hands rather than try to compel Alistair to do something he didn't wish to do.

His choice, to seize from his array of alternatives the course which seemed to pose the best chance of happiness for all of them.

He would do it.

Lying there, lost in thought, the need for sleep that came with the aftermath of release began to tug at Alistair. He wasn't even aware that he had drifted off until a movement jolted him and he opened his eyes to see Zevran sitting up, reaching for his breeches.

"You're leaving?" The question was out before Alistair really had a chance to consider the implications of it.

Zevran gave him a startled look, the dropped his eyes uncomfortably. "I, ah... was not certain I should stay. Even if you would welcome me, I have already been lectured by Wynne to stop flirting with you. She thinks I am trying to tempt you to stray from your lady."

Alistair laughed, struck by a delicious sense of absurdity that dispelled the awkward tension. "Well, in a way, you did."

"Oh? Just who has tempted whom here, I must wonder?" Zevran replied with a flash of his wicked grin. "I do not recall being the first to grab and manhandle you."

"True," Alistair conceded the point, his smile fading. "Why is this suddenly strange? It didn't feel strange before."

Zevran shrugged. "There is no shame in admitting you do not feel with me the same sort of closeness you feel with her," he said philosophically. "Perhaps that may come with time. Or perhaps we shall be different. Pleasure and intimacy are two very different things, my friend."

"Huh! Not for me, they're not," Alistair muttered, suddenly feeling annoyed and mulish. "If you leave now, all this feels... cheap. I don't think that's a very good place to begin. Leaving afterward, that's... the sort of thing you'd do with a whore, isn't it?"

Zevran shook his head quickly. "I certainly meant to imply nothing of the sort. I only wished to spare you any... awkwardness."

"Too late for that," Alistair snorted, suddenly feeling gruff and vulnerable, as though he'd stupidly said too much again. "Just... lie down and let's go to sleep. I'm too tired to think this hard."

Zevran smiled and dipped his head in a single acquiescent nod. "As you wish," he replied, rising to retrieve the bedroll he'd left propped beside the door for what had clearly been intended as a contingency for a smooth getaway. Alistair didn't know what to make of that, and he wasn't certain he wanted to.

And then Zevran was lying next to him, his back turned to Alistair. The lean lines of his muscles and the bold strokes of his tattoos were exposed by the blanket he had pulled up only to his waist. Alistair wondered if Zevran slept that way so that he was unimpeded if he needed to reach for his weapons. He'd complained often over the winter about how chilly Ferelden was compared to Antiva, and unlike the other thaigs they had visited, where volcanic fissures in the rock lent a dry heat to the caverns, Cadash Thaig was cool and damp.

Should he move closer and share his own warmth, or would that be presuming too much?

It was the markings which drew Alistair into action. Before he realized he even intended to reach out and touch them, he had. Those simple, elegant lines of ink could quickly become a fixation, he thought, skimming them with his fingers as Zevran shivered slightly.

"Perhaps you are not so tired, after all?" Zevran's voice was a little deeper than usual as he ventured the question.

"Apparently not." Alistair's body stirred, hardening. He moved to close the distance as Zevran rolled toward him.

Pleasure might not be intimacy, but it was a bloody good start.

(Please be sure to check out DragonReine's brilliant NSFW artwork for this chapter. You can find a link to her DeviantArt page in my profile.)


	47. Chapter Forty Seven: Reunion

Some days, Rìona wondered if she'd actually chosen the less exhausting course, staying in Orzammar. As the days after Leliana and Sten's return dragged on without any further word of Alistair and Zevran, attending the Assembly of Deshyrs to watch the dwarven nobility squabble futilely amongst themselves became a torment. Her back and hips ached with sitting for so long, her feet and ankles began to swell until she could no longer wear her boots and had to purchase a pair of soft nug-skin slippers. By her estimate and the midwife's confirmation, she had another three or four weeks until her babe was due—longer if it came late, as first babes were so often wont to do—but she felt huge and ungainly, and increasingly fearful.

When the Steward Bandelor declared the Assembly in recess for the evening, Rìona trudged wearily back to Bhelen's palace beside Leliana, Sten and Conall protectively flanking her. There had been no attacks from Harrowmont's supporters—apparently they were afraid of the negative publicity that would come with assaulting a pregnant woman—but the situation was becoming increasingly volatile, and Rìona feared what might happen if the matter wasn't settled soon.

"I'm really very tired," she murmured to Leliana once they were back in their wing of the palace. "Could you have a servant bring me a tray? I think I'll retire early rather than joining Prince Bhelen and his household for supper."

"Of course!" Leliana offered her a soft smile and an eager nod, and Rìona retreated to her chambers.

She was moping, she realized morosely as she lay upon the bed, too listless to bother with the tray of supper that had been delivered. Over a week had passed since Leliana and Sten's return to Orzammar, and still no word from Alistair and Zevran. Either Leliana's belief that they had been very close to the Anvil of the Void was mistaken, or they had encountered something unexpected.

Or perhaps something fatal.

_Please. Andraste have mercy, please. Not that. Not them, too._

As horrific as the thought was, Rìona realized she could not wait endlessly for them to return to Orzammar. At some point, she needed to go back to the surface and resume the struggle against the Blight, even if she must do so without the aid of the dwarves. If Alistair was—and she forced herself to think the word despite the agony it evoked—dead, she was the sole remaining Grey Warden in Ferelden.

Her mother. Her father. Fergus. Oriana. Oren. Cailan. Even Duncan, for all that she had despised him in the end. The thought of adding Alistair and Zevran's names to that list made her want to curl up and die. But somehow she would have to find a way to carry on.

She would wait for them until her lying-in was over and no longer, she decided, wiping away the tears that came with the acceptance implied by making such a resolution. The dwarves also observed a period of recovery for women after they gave birth to their children, as women did on the surface. Forty days, was the Fereldan tradition, before a woman resumed her labors and duties. Time enough for the babe to establish a strong suckle and for the bleeding to stop.

Or, in Rìona's case, time enough to find a wet nurse and arrange for fosterage, even if it meant leaving her babe amongst the dwarves while she returned to the surface. Perhaps the young women she had met in Dust Town, Zerlinda, might be persuaded to take on another nurseling in addition to her own babe. If Rìona convinced Bhelen's consort, Rica, to foster Rìona's babe, Zerlinda would then have shelter in the palace and a generous income to take care of her own child, rather than begging in Dust Town or abandoning her son in the Deep Roads for having been the same sex as his casteless father.

What Arl Eamon would do, if Alistair was presumed dead and there was no other candidate for the throne, Rìona couldn't guess, but that would have to be her first stop. Loghain was still the greatest threat to Ferelden, and they couldn't get on with the business of fighting the Blight with him conducting a campaign of terror against half the Bannorn and wasting resources barricading Ferelden against the Orlesians. How any of this would play out without Alistair, Rìona couldn't say. But she would have to try.

She wept softly in fear and despair, clutching her pillow as Conall stood by the bedside, whining, and licked at the tears on her face. At least he was still with her, even now, she thought, offering him a trembling smile and rubbing his head. At length, her tears ceased and Conall lay down alongside her bed with a weary huff, and Rìona was able to sleep. 

* * *

She was dreaming, of a body slipping onto the bed beside her, and gentle fingers brushing her face. Soft lips in a smooth, hairless face brushed over her cheek.

"_Despierta, mi ciela. Estamos de vuelta._"

"Zevran," she mumbled sleepily an instant before the lips closed over hers and his tongue flicked gently at her mouth, pleading for entrance.

Rìona's eyes flew open as she gave a startled gasp to see his face before hers, his eyes tender and full of joy, intently studying her face.

"_Zevran!_" Rìona cried, and his hand cupped the back of her head, pulling her into an urgent kiss.

"_Sí, mi amor. Estoy aquí,_" he mumbled against her lips. Rìona had only an instant to enjoy his kiss before her mind finished the process of separating dream from reality.

"Where's Alistair?" she gasped as he pressed fervent kisses to her face.

"He is being detained by Prince Bhelen's man, Gavorn. He will be along soon, but I could not wait to see you again."

Another kiss, deep and full of desperate need. Rìona moaned into it, responding despite the questions flying through her brain.

"Wait!" She wrenched her lips from his, burying her face against his neck to escape his efforts to kiss her again. "Zevran. My love, I can't do this, not until I've spoken with him. I need to explain..."

"Tch-tch. He knows I am here, _querida,_" Zevran replied, shushing her. "And I am quite certain he is in no doubt of the greeting I intended to give you."

"I'm not, though you could have waited." Alistair's wry response startled Rìona, making her jump. He closed the door behind him as she attempted to disentangle herself from Zevran and the bedclothes.

"Forgive me," Zevran replied smoothly. "I feared you would lose the battle to convince Vartag Gavorn not to wake our benefactor, the prince, so that you might report to him. You could have been hours, if it had come to that."

"Not a chance," Alistair growled. "I told Gavorn in no uncertain terms that there was a Paragon-wrought crown destined for the candidate of my choice at the Assembly tomorrow, and that if I was interrupted by politics before I got a good night's sleep, a bath and a hot meal that didn't involve some variety of dried deepstalker, that candidate would be Harrowmont."

Zevran began to laugh, his humor open and unrestrained, as Rìona stared at Alistair in disbelief, pushing herself off the bed with all the wallowing lack of grace her encumbered agility allowed her. "You found Branka, then? It's over?"

"Yes, and it's a long story. Maker, I've missed you!" Crossing the room in a few rapid strides, Alistair clutched her to him and kissed her fiercely. The rough, unkempt growth of beard covering his face scraped her skin, but Rìona was beyond caring. The breathless sound she made against his lips was caught somewhere between a sob and a laugh, and she was vaguely aware that her face was wet with tears. She pressed as close to Alistair as the enormous mound of her belly would allow.

"You're all right!" she whispered almost prayerfully between hard, fast, desperate kisses, finally drawing back to stare at him in wonder. She touched his face as though expecting to find him immaterial, a figment of her imagination. Then she turned to look at Zevran, who was lounging on the bed, apparently without a care in the world. "I was so afraid, for both of you. I was beginning to lose hope!"

"There wasn't a day down there I didn't ache to return to you," Alistair murmured, pressing a kiss to the top of her head. "I swear, I won't leave you again, no matter what I have to do."

"Nor will I." There was something fervent in Zevran's tone as he rose from the bed, his words taking on all the finality of a sacred vow. Alistair stepped away, and Rìona's confusion was complete, for he made no objection when Zevran took her into his arms, his knuckles stroking her face tenderly.

"I assume the two of you have reached... some sort of understanding?" she asked, unable to relax against Zevran with so many questions unanswered. Her eyes sought Alistair nervously, but he seemed unconcerned.

"You could say that," he chuckled, and Rìona thought she detected a hint of a blush, though between the coarse beard and dim lantern light, she couldn't be sure. Certainly, he looked slightly sheepish as he began to tug on the buckles to his filthy armor. Before Rìona could inquire further, however, there was a rap at the door, prompting her to seek out her dressing gown before calling permission to enter to the bleary-eyed maidservant who had clearly been roused from her rest to attend to the needs of the recently-arrived Grey Warden and his party.

She set down a tray laden with slices of succulent roast nug which had likely been cooking for the prince's breakfast, tubers and mushrooms, cheeses, bread made with grain imported from the surface, and a flagon of ale. The savory aroma of the roast meat and gravy reminded Rìona that she had neglected her own supper, and her stomach rumbled queasily, as it did even this late in her pregnancy when she awoke hungry.

The servant ducked into the bathing chamber to draw and heat a bath, as Zevran pressed a kiss to Rìona's temple. "Politics is our first priority, yes? While our Alistair catches you up on what happened with the Paragon, I shall bathe in my own chamber and get a change of clothes. Then I will return and we may all discuss... other matters that are of only slightly less pressing concern."

With a jaunty grin that was belied by the almost yearning sincerity in his eyes, Zevran walked to the door.

"I know the way the pair of you eat. Be sure to save me some food, yes?" 

* * *

Rìona sat in a chair in the bathing chamber as the maidservant bathed and groomed Alistair, washing and rinsing his hair three times before taking a pair of shears to it to trim the ragged ends.

"Maker's breath, look at you!" He gave an admiring whistle, eying her figure with a rather embarrassing amount of warmth, considering the presence of the maidservant.

"I know. I'm enormous," Rìona muttered self-consciously, rubbing her protruding abdomen where the babe was pressing particularly insistently with a fist, or perhaps a foot. "You'll have to bear me to Redcliffe on a litter pulled by a pair of brontos. I certainly won't be walking the distance in this state."

"Then we'll hire a cart." Alistair shrugged. "No doubt the trade caravans will be eager to resume business with Orzammar once the succession is settled and some merchant will be offloading his cargo and preparing for the return journey by the time we're ready to leave. Unless you'd rather stay here until the babe is born?"

Rìona shook her head. "No. We have several weeks to go yet. I want to see sunshine again, and get news of the progress of the Blight and the civil war, and birth my babe in a place that doesn't reek of brimstone. I've been going out of my head these past two months, between worrying about you and simply not knowing about anything going on _anywhere._ I'm afraid I was never meant to sit off to the side while events happen around me."

Alistair's expression was grim. "Enjoy it while it lasts, love. We'll be back in the thick of it soon enough, and I've seen just what we're up against now; the horde and the archdemon."

"Leliana told me everything that happened up until you sent her away, after the Dead Trenches and Bownammar. How long after that did it take you to find the Paragon, and what happened?"

Rìona listened, aghast, as Alistair told her about Branka's madness and the true function of the Anvil of the Void. He described the days-long process of puzzling out Caridin's traps, and the battle with Branka that ensued after Alistair opted to assist Caridin in destroying the Anvil of the Void.

His narrative fell into silence when the maid began to shave him, until between strokes of the blade, he asked, "What about you? How have matters been here in Orzammar."

Rìona grimaced, glancing away. She couldn't tell him about her attempts to pry information about Loghain and his plans from Ambassador Gainley. The shame of the outrageous proposition the ambassador had offered her was still too keen, and Alistair would be furious if he knew. No doubt he'd want to take action to defend her honor, and that would be futile. She was destined for disgrace one way or the other—all Gainley had done was drive that fact home to her.

Beside that, there was little she could tell Alistair about the time she had passed in Orzammar while he was away. Should she regale him with the afternoons she spent searching for the scavenger who had found Sten's sword? Or the endless days watching the futile bickering that took place on the floor of the Chamber of the Assembly? With a frown of discontent, Rìona realized she felt... useless. Marginalized.

She didn't much like the feeling.

She'd had no choice. She could not have gone into the Deep Roads with them. Not only would she not have been able to cope with the travel and fighting, but if they had been down there only a few weeks longer, she might have been forced to have her babe in those endless, dark, tainted tunnels. No. She could not have done anything other than what she had done, staying here in Orzammar. But she still hated that matters had progressed without her.

She'd been the driving force behind their efforts for too long to give over control so easily now.

When he was shaved, and the maidservant departed, Alistair sat at the table across from her, digging in with a voracious appetite, spearing chunks of juicy nug with his table dagger and devouring them while Rìona ate more sedately. He was nude but for a pair of clean braies, for all his clothing had been carefully hauled away to be thrown into the rivers of molten fire running around Orzammar—no laundress would touch it, exposed as it had been to darkspawn blood. There were no dressing gowns of a size to fit him, of course. The maid assured them a seamstress had been awakened, who would have clothing made for him by morning. His armor, too, had been taken, to be polished and oiled and repaired before the Assembly tomorrow.

Once the maidservant was gone, Zevran returned to their chamber, strolling in easily without bothering to knock. Rìona's eyebrows lifted at that. Zevran clearly had no fear that he was intruding, and if Alistair was concerned with his own, almost complete, nudity in Zevran's presence, he made no issue of it. He merely extended a hand to an empty chair in silent invitation for Zevran to sit down and eat with them.

Unlike Alistair, Zevran was somewhat dressed, in a relatively clean pair of leather breeches and a loose linen shirt unlaced at the neck. His own clothes did not appear to have suffered the same copious exposure to darkspawn blood as Alistair's had, for he did not wear these garments beneath his armor as Alistair did.

Zevran's smug nonchalance and Alistair's silence as he continued to tuck into his supper were near to driving Rìona mad, and she glowered at the pair of them.

"Are either of you going to tell me what is going on?"

"Ah, forgive us our distraction, my dear," Zevran mumbled between bites. If he was somewhat less voracious than Alistair, it was only by virtue of the fact that he wasn't a Grey Warden and didn't have quite the same appetite. "It has been some time since we've had palatable food of any sort."

"Of course. Sorry." Resolving herself to be patient, Rìona leaned back in her chair, nibbling on a piece of bread as she waited for them to finish. It was strange, to find herself the one off-put and ill-at-ease while the two of them were clearly comfortable with whatever decisions they had made in her absence. She should have been relieved that they _had_ resolved their problem, but she didn't think she would truly be able to relax until she knew the shape of that resolution, and whether Alistair was truly all right with it.

He'd _seemed_ all right, earlier, arriving to find her in Zevran's arms, but still...

"You can stop looking at him that way," Zevran teased, pushing his trencher aside and wiping his face and hands with his napkin. "I have been rather pointedly reminded several times in recent weeks that our Alistair's sensibilities are not so delicate as we assume."

The heavy note of satisfaction in his tone drew Rìona's disbelieving gaze. Surely he wasn't implying...

And then she saw it, the fading mark peeking out of the open collar of Zevran's shirt. Rìona's hand flew to her own shoulder, where she'd worn similar bruises a number of times, courtesy of Alistair's penchant for nibbling and sucking at the crook of her neck. Leliana had giggled and teased her for it, as they had left the Brecilian Forest.

"Oh. I see." Rìona's mouth fell open as she floundered for words. "Clearly your time in the Deep Roads wasn't completely grim. Or have the darkspawn picked up a habit of... nuzzling?"

"Are you upset?" Alistair tossed his napkin down and pushed away from the table, rounding it to kneel beside her chair. There was a crease between his eyebrows, the slightest hint of worry that he might have done something wrong, and Rìona shook her head quickly.

"I'd be a hypocrite, if I were," she replied after a moment. "No, I'm simply... astonished. And slightly envious." She began to recover, chiding with considerably more aplomb, "Honestly, you couldn't have waited? I think I would rather like to have seen that."

Alistair did blush then, ducking his head. He seized one of her hands in both of his and pressed an ardent kiss to it. Rìona caressed the line of his jaw with her free hand, cupping his face. "This is truly what you want?"

"It is," he swore solemnly. "Everything is too uncertain, love. I told you. I've seen what's coming toward us. With the fight that's ahead, it just seems... idiotic to be spending what little time of grace we have miserable because of a silly point of convention."

"It's not merely convention," Rìona replied. "Not everyone can tolerate the sight of someone they love with another person. I've never asked you to be the sort of man my father was, Alistair."

"I know, and I'm grateful for that. You let me come to this in my own time, my own way . But frankly, jealousy seems a bit silly right now, too." He stroked the back of her hand, gazing up at her earnestly. "If something should happen to me, I can't think of anything I'd want more than for you and the babe to have someone else there who loves you as much as I do, someone who will never let any harm come to you. Besides," he offered her a wicked grin, one that sent a pang through her and reminded Rìona just how long she'd been with only her own fingers for relief, "as it turns out, the sight of you and Zev together is something I really very much _want_ to see."

Oh, Maker...

"That, my friend, is a wish I will be only too happy to indulge." Rìona started slightly as Zevran's voice purred the words practically next to her ear. She'd been so focused on Alistair, she hadn't noticed Zevran rising from his chair. His hands came down lightly on her shoulders, his fingers stroking the skin at the edge of the collar of her dressing gown, and Rìona shivered. "It has been too many months since I have truly touched you, _mi ciela._"

"I thought Alistair wanted a full night's sleep," she teased, and Alistair grinned.

"Yes, well, I may have just been angling for some uninterrupted privacy with that particular demand. Funny thing about the Deep Roads—you lose all track of time. It's possible we broke camp only a few hours before we reached Orzammar." His grin faded into a slight frown. "Is it all right? I mean, this close to the babe's coming?"

Rìona nodded. "I don't see why it wouldn't be, so long as we're careful and creative. My lack of agility no doubt poses the biggest problem."

"Have you been in any pain since we left?" Zevran asked solicitously.

"No, beyond the typical discomfort that comes with being the size of a bronto. Once I stopped trying to do too much, everything improved." Rìona ducked her head, stroking the back of Zevran's hand with her face, pressing a kiss to his fingers as they came up to cup her jaw. Her eyes met Alistair's and she found in his gaze no jealousy or reservation. He was open and relaxed, happy even, as he watched her with adoring eyes.

"I'm all right," he said softly, reading the unspoken question in her gaze. "Truly. I want this."

"Then you shall have it." Rìona rose from her chair, attempting to convey a calm and regal attitude, despite the anxious fluttering of her pulse. Why should she be nervous now, she wondered? She was poised on the brink of having what she had most yearned for—both these beloved men by her side. Zevran, whose cold pragmatism and innate defenses had made it difficult to know the vulnerable, loving man underneath. And Alistair, whose kind and gentle earnestness belied the forceful, aggressive, determined man within.

Perhaps it was fear of being too content, too complacent, which made her quail slightly. She thought again of Ambassador Gainley's insult, and knew there were realities they were hiding from. But if she was already disgraced, it would hardly matter. At least she would have this.

Behind the lattice-work partition dividing the bedchamber from the rest of the suite, Rìona paused and turned, pleased to see they were both following, Zevran peeling his linen shirt over his head as he approached. With a beckoning smile, she unbelted her dressing gown and drew apart the halves, letting it slide down her arms to pool on the floor.

"Maker's breath!" There was a raw edge to Alistair's voice as his eyes fixated on her belly, and Rìona stroked her hand over the mound—not that it needed any emphasis. Disgraced she might be by her pregnancy, but Alistair's reaction almost made it worthwhile. Before another instant passed, he had closed the distance between them, his lips urgent and worshipful upon hers as his hands slid down her arms and sought the roundness of her abdomen.

His mouth drank at hers endlessly as his hands reacquainted themselves with her body, becoming familiar with its evolved shape, stroking and caressing. He cupped her breasts, with their large, dark crests, and tested their new, heavier weight. He gripped her hips, slightly wider and softer than they had been before, rounder with the improvements her diet had undergone here in Orzammar. He knelt before her and placed a reverent kiss upon her belly, hugging her with his arms around her thighs.

Rìona draped her arms around his shoulders and held him to her, adoring him madly. He yearned so desperately for a family, for connection, she thought, not for the first time. There was no hesitation within him to love and accept her child, a child many men might have ignored or neglected to acknowledge. To Alistair, it didn't matter that the babe was not his own; he would love it nonetheless.

Perhaps, seen in that light, his inclusion of Zevran into their relationship wasn't all that strange.

At Alistair's urging, Rìona sat on the bed, reclining as Alistair knelt between her legs, his hands pushing on her thighs, spreading her as he nuzzled at her belly and lower. Rìona sighed, her head falling back, only to meet with Zevran's chest as he moved in behind her and took her weight against his body. While she'd been focused upon Alistair, his breeches had come off and she could feel him, hard against her back.

Oh, Maker. It _had_ been too long. She hadn't let herself truly think about how badly she'd missed the scent and feel of Zevran, even in those moments her heart overflowed with love for Alistair. She turned her head, looking over her shoulder with a wordless invitation, which he answered ardently. At the awkward angle, the kiss was sloppy, a greedy, open-mouthed tangle of thrusting tongues. Zevran's arms folded around her, his hands seeking her breasts, and Rìona gasped when his fingers gently rolled one of her nipples.

When she turned again to look down at Alistair, he was staring in undisguised admiration.

"By all means, don't let me interrupt," he said, with the eager smile he sometimes got when Rìona offered to teach him some new pleasure.

"I must say, this new shape of yours is most intriguing. I have not had much of a chance to see it before." Zevran thumbed her nipples, prompting Rìona to bite her lower lip, arching slightly to push her breasts more firmly into his hands. "Particularly these. As bosoms go, you may very well rival Wynne now."

Alistair winced. "Please don't say Wynne's name in here."

"My apologies." Zevran offered Alistair a grin that wasn't apologetic in the least. "Imagine, in a few weeks' time, these same lovely breasts will be swollen and full of milk. Will there be enough to share, do you think?"

Alistair groaned, resting his head against Rìona's thigh. He nipped lightly at her skin, and then his tongue darted out to taste her, and Rìona's closed her eyes, relaxing against Zevran.

"Yes, Alistair. _Please._"

He obliged without hesitation, stroking her slowly, languidly with his tongue at first, dipping inside her to sample her flavor. And when he had indulged his own need to savor, those almost soothing licks gave way to more pointed and direct caresses. It had been so very long. Nearly immediately, a light series of spasms ran through her, almost too easily. Not nearly enough to satiate the ache of over two months alone. Alistair wasn't satisfied with it, either. He pressed on, pushed her harder. His lips and tongue plied her mercilessly, bringing Rìona's hips up in helpless, undulating movements until Alistair had to grip her tightly to keep her still.

"Hold her, Zev," he demanded, and Zevran's arms tightened around her, holding her immobile and Alistair's assault on her senses redoubled. Unable to writhe or buck or bolt, Rìona could do nothing but turn her face toward Zevran's neck, growling and straining with pleasure so intense it bordered on pain as Alistair drove her closer and closer to the precipice.

"Give in to it, _querida_," Zevran breathed into her hair. "We have you."

When her climax crashed through her, it was nearly brutal in its force, cracking through her body like a whiplash. Her spine arched, her body strung taut with pleasure so unbearable she wanted to fight against it, to hide away from it. Held and helpless between them, all she could do was sob and scream as shudder after shudder wracked her.

When it was over, Zevran moved her gently down to lie upon the bed. Dazed and panting, she watched as Alistair pushed himself up from kneeling beside the bed, and Zevran leaned over her body toward him.

"Will you share?" His voice was dark, husky with desire. Alistair moved in, sitting on the bed, as Zevran licked lightly at his glistening chin, moving slowly and deliberately toward Alistair's mouth.

Rìona waited for Alistair to flinch away, but he didn't. He shuddered powerfully, and lowered his face, offering his mouth to Zevran. She stared as they kissed, coming together over her body in an aggressive clash. Alistair's hands closed on Zevran's shoulders, his fair skin contrasting with Zevran's swarthy complexion.

It was breathtaking to see them together, dark and light, lithe and stalwart. They were beautiful, so much so that watching them made her afraid. Surely this was all too complete a joy to last.

She didn't realize she had begun weeping until they turned to her in unison and the dazed pleasure fled from their faces, replaced immediately with concern.

"What is it?" Zevran demanded, at the same moment Alistair asked, "What's wrong?"

"Nothing. Nothing!" Impatiently, Rìona wiped at her face, feeling foolish. "It's simply... too perfect."

But she was wrong. Perfection was the moment when they both lay beside her, sheltering her between them, soothing her with kisses and caresses, assurances of their love both silent and spoken. Zevran surrounded her from behind, trapping her against Alistair's chest. Their arms formed a cage in which she would happily have remained captive forever, until that tumultuous instant of fear abated and was replaced by passion and need once more.

Part of her wanted to take a more active role, to show them both with every last ounce of her skill how much she adored them both. But they didn't seem to particularly want that. Perhaps they were experimenting on finding their way with Rìona added into whatever dynamic they had established in the Deep Roads, or perhaps they were simply too hungry after all those long weeks in the dark. Either way, they both seemed eager to bestow their unrestrained attentions upon her, and she was eager to receive them, however passive they required her to be.

Alistair lavished attention upon her breasts, drawing her nipple into his mouth and sucking firmly as Zevran's fingers skated through the moisture on her folds, parting her, sliding into her.

"So long have I waited, _mi encantadora,_" he murmured in her ear as Rìona mewled, hooking her leg back over his to afford his plunging fingers better access. "I ache to be inside you again."

"Please!" she gasped, and Alistair lifted his face from her breasts.

"Yes." There was no uncertainty in his eyes as he made the declaration, only _wanting._ "I want to watch you. I want to see your face as Zevran takes you."

Rìona's eyes closed and a spasm of desire clenched her lower body with an intensity that almost hurt. "Ah," Zevran sighed, withdrawing his slick fingers, "you should feel how wet your words have made our sweet Warden."

"Yeah?" Alistair's fingers sought her as Zevran drew away. They brushed inquisitively over her folds before pressing experimentally against her nub again, and Rìona jerked.

"Too much!" Over-sensitized, she gasped. Without any hint of chagrin, Alistair withdrew, a pleased gleam in his eyes. He loved bringing her to that state, pleasuring her until she was wrung out and couldn't take any more before he took his own pleasure. Whatever he had discovered with Zevran, that hadn't changed.

Zevran shifted, his lower body sliding between her legs even as his upper body moved away from her, putting them almost at right angles to one another. He placed a pillow behind her back and urged, "Lean back, _mi amada._"

She did, and when she lay there, half on her side and half-reclined, he drew her upper leg higher over his hip, and paused on the brink of entering her.

"Zevran..." Rìona whimpered as the head of his shaft rubbed back and forth across her entrance, teasing her. "Please."

"Is this what you wish to see, my friend?" Zevran asked, his voice sliding over Rìona's ears like a brush of silk. Alistair shivered, and Rìona realized he was far from immune to the pull of that voice. "Are you watching?"

"Yes," Alistair growled, his eyes fierce and intent upon Rìona's face as she stared up at him. "Do it."

In the next instant, Zevran slid inside her in one long, slow, smooth stroke. Rìona's eyes snapped shut and her head fell back, her throat straining about a keening moan that rose up at the almost-ache of being so deliciously filled after so long without. Her hand sought Zevran's where it rested upon her hip, her fingers intertwining with his, gripping hard

When her eyes opened, Alistair was staring raptly at her face. "Maker's breath, that's beautiful," he sighed, his fingertips lightly tracing the arc of her cheekbone, the line of her jaw. Then, as Zevran began to move, Alistair's eyes went past her to him, and there was an instant, a flicker of... something. Hunger. Yearning.

This wasn't simply about accommodating the unexpected love that had developed between her and Zevran, Rìona realized in that moment.

Zevran's pace was slow, gentle, gradual. For all his professed impatience, he seemed in no hurry, and it was almost soothing, the rocking motion as he moved within her. But there was a tension in the grip of his hand upon hers that belied the easy rhythm and hinted at a much deeper need.

"Are you well, _querida?_" His voice was tense and strained as he rasped the question.

"Yes. Please just... let go."

He did, surging into her, driving breathless cries from her lungs as Alistair lay before her, staring into her face. She didn't know when he untied the drawstring of his braies, shoving them down his hips, and she was only vaguely aware of the motion of his hand between their bodies, moving in time with Zevran's thrusts. His low groans underpinned Zevran's gasping imprecations, until Zevran went still and spat a curse, gripping Rìona tightly, pulsing deep within her. His harsh, ragged panting served as a counterpoint to the slapping slide of Alistair's hand upon his own flesh, and Rìona's eyes opened in time to see the strained pleasure on his beloved face transform to rapturous relief as his release spilled hot between their bodies. 

* * *

"I'm going to marry you," Alistair announced some time later, when they had cleaned up and she lay nestled between them under the bedcovers, drowsy and content.

"I beg your pardon?" Rìona's eyes sprang open as Zevran chuckled.

"Perhaps not the most adroit proposal ever rendered, my friend," he chided with good humor.

Alistair harrumphed slightly. "A proposal implies some possibility of refusal, and there's no way I'm leaving that door open."

"Don't I get a say in this?" Rìona asked, more out of form than any actual objection.

Alistair gave her an incredulous glance. "Are you actually intending to refuse?"

"Well, no, but it might be nice to be consulted. I've had little enough say in matters recently, I'd rather not relinquish all control of this decision as well." Again, she felt that stab of fear that had plagued her earlier, the terror of being too happy, of taking too much for granted. She wished she could explain it to them, without feeling silly, or that she was borrowing trouble.

"A fair point, _querida_, and it is not our intention to disregard your wishes." Zevran stroked her back in a placating caress. "It is only that Alistair and I have had much time to discuss these matters recently, and with the timing being what it is, some decisions need to be made rather soon, yes?"

Uneasily, Rìona relaxed again between them. "Very well, then. Tell me about these plans you have laid."

"I've decided to let Arl Eamon put me forward as the heir to the throne," Alistair explained somberly. "If I do that, I almost _have_ to make Cailan's babe my heir, considering how unlikely it is I'll ever have one of my own. This isn't just me being sentimental, you know, however nicely it works out on that front. With Cailan's letter, the Landsmeet will see it as honoring the king's final request, rather than as a Grey Warden grab for power. It's not only logical, it's damn near the only possible way to handle the whole thing."

"Well, yes, I'd thought much the same thing. But Alistair... you never _wanted_ to be king."

"No," he sighed, "and if I saw a better way for us all to be together, I probably still wouldn't. But... I'm coming around to the idea. After all you've told me about what your father taught you about the duty of the king and the nobility in Ferelden, I think perhaps there's a lot of good we could do, bringing all that back. Remind Fereldans who they are."

"And what of you, Zevran?" Rìona turned her head to ask over her shoulder. "Where do you fit in all this?"

"I shall be the delightful scandal and secret terror of the royal court for all the years of your reign," he announced gleefully. "Imagine your uptight Fereldan nobility wondering about me. 'Who is this elf the king and queen keep so close?' they will wonder. 'Is it true he was once one of the notorious Antivan Crows? Do the king and queen employ an assassin? Is he the queen's lover, or the king's?' Ah! They shall drive themselves mad with curiosity. It will be a great deal of fun, I think. And, should a threat to your rule arise, I will be ideally situated to deal with it, yes?"

"Well, it seems as though the two of you have this all worked out," Rìona said with a thoughtful frown.

"You don't seem very happy about it." Concerned, Alistair studied her face, and again Rìona felt a welling sense of frustrated futility, an inability to explain her disquiet.

"No. I am," she assured him with a trembling smile. "It seems... perfect."

He kissed her then, a gentle kiss, full of hope and promise, and Zevran pressed closer to her, and Rìona forced herself to push aside her doubts and ignore the nagging voice which taunted, _too perfect._

* * *

It was not until the next afternoon, when Alistair was at the Assembly of Deshyrs, with Shale, Wynne and Oghren, bestowing the crown upon Prince Bhelen, and Rìona was in the process of organizing the rest of their party for an immediate departure to Redcliffe, that the cause of her fear finally took form.

"Leliana, did you borrow or return any of the Shaperate scrolls I had in my rooms?" she asked the bard, who was sitting and chatting as Rìona arranged her packs.

"I read a few, thinking I might compose some tales about the dwarves, but I put them all back," she replied with a puzzled look.

"And there were no other parchments or documents among them?" With a mounting sense of panic, Rìona began to tear all her neatly stowed belongings out of her pack, flinging them carelessly across the floor.

"No, none." Concerned, Leliana asked, "Is something missing?"

From his perch at the foot of the bed, Zevran surged to his feet, quickly crossing to kneel beside Rìona.

"What is it, _querida_?"

Hopelessness, all the more crushing for the bright sense of joy she'd felt for a few fanciful hours, settled in Rìona's chest.

Too perfect. She had known it was all too perfect to last.

"Cailan's documents," she murmured with a fatalistic sense of resignation. "They're missing."


	48. Chapter Forty Eight: Maelstrom

"The Antivan Crows send their regards."

Zevran crouched beside him and watched, as the ambassador roused from his besotted slumber. A fondness for drink, it turned out the ambassador had. Not habitually excessive, but enough that he slept deeply after dismissing his guards for the night. They'd all grown complacent during their stay in Orzammar, unconcerned that anything might threaten the ambassador here.

That complacency would cost the ambassador his life.

Panic flooded the man's face, and Zevran moved quickly, sitting on his chest and pressing the point of his dagger firmly against the throbbing artery in Gainley's neck.

"I would advise no loud noises or sudden movements, ambassador," he said coldly. "I can make your final moments very long and very painful if I choose."

"What do you want?" the ambassador whimpered softly, straining to get away from the dagger at his throat.

"Where are the documents?"

Despite his fear, the ambassador sneered. The arrogance it took to affect such hauteur under such circumstances told Zevran much that Rìona's evasive description of her dealings with this man had omitted. Now he knew why her eyes skittered aside when she spoke of the man. He had insulted her, somehow.

"So, it's the lying, traitorous bitch of a Grey Warden you work for? Do you think she'll be able to pay you, when her neck's good as in a noose?"

Zevran reined in the impulse to slit Gainley's throat immediately, and instead replied, "You are mistaken. The Warden has taken no contract on you. But a contract exists, nonetheless, and if it is not fulfilled by me, it will be fulfilled by some other agent of the Antivan Crows. If you answer my question, I _could_ be convinced to offer you the chance to run, before they find you. I will ask one more time. Where are the documents?"

"They're already on their way to Denerim. I had my courier out the gates the moment they were opened after King Bhelen was crowned."

"Which route did he take? What was his mode of travel?"

"North Road. He's mounted on a swift steed, and he'll pass them off to a relay with a fresh mount at a way-station along the road south of Highever, and another south of Amaranthine. You'll never intercept them. They'll be in Denerim within two weeks."

Zevran quashed the urge to curse. "To whom are they being delivered? The regent? Howe?"

Gainley sniffed. "I was appointed by, and answer to, the _rightful_ Queen of Ferelden, who will deal with this upstart whore with pretensions in her own time, I'm sure. Now, unless you have any further questions, I have some packing I need to do."

"I said I _could_ be convinced," Zevran replied with a chilly smile. "But not by you."

Before the ambassador could panic or protested, his lifeblood was saturating the pillow beneath him. Zevran casually wiped the blade of his dagger upon the coverlet and slipped silently into the shadows and away from Gainley's suite. 

* * *

"That's it, then. The letter is out of our reach," Rìona said with a hopeless shake of her head. "I have to give Gainley credit. He played me at my own game and I never saw it happening. Well. Anora will certainly destroy it; it would be a humiliation for her if it became public knowledge, as well as undermining her claim to the throne, which is the basis for her father's regency."

"Is there any chance she can use it against you?" Zevran asked. "The late ambassador did not seem to think the queen will look kindly on the fact that you were poised to replace her."

"I can't imagine how. If she acknowledges the letter exists, she damages her own cause. No, her only chance is to destroy it, and perhaps attempt to cast doubt on the paternity of my babe."

"I don't see why any of this matters!" Alistair interjected impatiently. "It doesn't have to have any bearing on our plans. I can still marry you. I'll do it now, in fact, before anyone has a chance to question it. He may not be a revered mother, but as the only ordained Andrastian priest in Orzammar, Brother Burkel can witness the marriage."

"No, Alistair." Zevran gritted his teeth at the utter lack of fight, the complete resignation in Rìona's voice. "If you're going to be king, you cannot marry me. I'm disgraced. You'd be labeled a cuckold before you even took the crown."

"Not if I claim the babe is mine."

"And perjure yourself before the Landsmeet?" It was the first hint of outrage she had displayed since Zevran had returned from killing Gainley. "Is that really what you would want your first act as king to be? And even if you did, there would still be questions. They'll ask why you waited until I was practically on my childbed before you wed me, if you're so certain the babe is yours. And that says nothing of the fact that it will be seen as confirmation of all Loghain's claims that the Grey Wardens want to wrest control of the country from its rightful rulers. Besides, the one thing we naïvely overlooked in all our fanciful dreaming was the fact that my twin brother was a mage. What if this child turns out to have magic as well? Your only heir will be unable to inherit your throne, and we'll be facing civil war again in thirty years unless you set me aside and wed another the moment the templars take our child from us."

"Fanciful dreaming?" Alistair shot to his feet, pacing the room in rapid, agitated strides as Rìona sat with her hands upon her belly, looking somehow very small. "This is our _future_ we're discussing!"

"It's a future we had no business discussing." Zevran had no doubt she intended her words to sound firm. Instead, they came off as apathetic. "I cannot be your wife if you're going to take the crown."

"Then I won't take the bloody crown!"

"You _must!_" Rìona cried. "We cannot allow Arl Eamon to side with Loghain, or this Blight will never end, not with Loghain too busy barricading Ferelden against Orlais and slaughtering his own people to combat it. I'm sorry, Alistair. I thought, when you declared you had decided to take the crown, that you had finally come to understand these things. I've tried very hard not to press this upon you, but now with the letter gone, we have no choice. You must be king. We cannot throw away our best, and perhaps our only, chance of bringing Loghain and Howe down, all on account of a disappointed sense of romanticism."

"So just like that, you're giving up?" he demanded, something anguished lending a jagged edge to his words. "You're going to disregard everything we hoped for, all _three_ of us?"

"Of course not! We can still be together, Alistair. I can be your mistress, for a time. I can help you rule, quietly, discreetly, from behind the throne. In fact, that's likely the best course. That way, you still have the bargaining chip of an alliance by marriage to offer. You can take a bride with whom you might have an heir. There are a few unwed female banns whose votes might be advantageous to you, and a number of banns and arls with eligible daughters or sisters..."

Alistair spat a vulgar curse Zevran hadn't even been aware he knew. "I can't believe I'm hearing this! You're already trying to chose a bride for me? Maker's breath! _This_ is your idea of an acceptable outcome? To by my _mistress?_"

"Do you think this is easy for me?" Rìona struggled to push herself to her feet; standing there, facing off against Alistair in all his fury, did nothing to make her seem any less small than she had seemed huddled in the chair. It was all Zevran could do to hold his silence. "I can never reclaim Highever, disgraced as I am. The people will need a teyrn or teyrna of unimpeachable credibility as they rebuild, after the damage Howe has done to my family name. The Couslands have ruled Highever since before the unification, and now I must let it pass to another bloodline and deny my child his heritage. And as much of a hypocrite as it makes me, the idea of you taking another woman to wife, of bedding her, of having a child with her, makes me want to _die._ Because I know you, Alistair. You'll never be able to keep your affections separate. Sooner or later, you would begin to love her and I would lose you. But I'll take the time I can get, and count it a blessing. It's all I have."

"And what of your babe? Will you just let him be born a bastard?" Alistair asked angrily.

"I have no choice." Demoralized. Hopeless. Ashamed. Strange, Zevran thought. So many trials she had come through, to get to this point, and this was the one which defeated her. What had happened, while he and Alistair were in the Deep Roads, that wrought such a change? How had she become so convinced of her own unworthiness? "My only hope now is to find him a respectable fosterage, something more in line with the standing of an acknowledged bastard."

Sighing and rubbing her back as though it pained her, Rìona sought her chair again, curling into it as though she would hide away if she could.

"I'm sorry, Alistair. I know this isn't the future you dreamed of, but we have no other choices. I brought this upon myself, when I played my game with Cailan. Duncan rightly named himself a whore-master when he sent me to the king's bed. Courtesan or dockside strumpet, it's all the same. I'm a whore, as my mother was before me. And the future king cannot marry a whore."

Alistair stared at her in revolted disbelief, his agony an almost palpable thing.

"You never heard me at all, when I tried to tell you how much more you are. Did you?" he asked softly, pain making his voice raw. "Not a single word."

He stormed from the room, and Rìona sat frozen for a long moment after the echoing slam of the door had resolved into silence. She did not weep, but merely stared vacantly at the floor.

At length, she spoke, her voice barely a whisper in the stillness. "Do you know, my first three lovers all died on the same day? Perhaps I should have seen it as an omen of things to come."

Zevran held his peace, as she fell quiet again.

"Talk to him, please, Zevran," she murmured after another moment. "Try to convince him to be... pragmatic about this."

In an instant, Zevran's deliberate calm snapped.

"Do you think I can _take sides?_" he demanded with frosty anger. "The moment I do so, there will always be one on the outside, not welcomed within, and that one may end up being me. And so here I am, so close to the thing I never knew I wanted and now cannot live without, and it is all falling apart. And you will not fight for it."

Unfurling, he rose from his chair, torn between the desire to comfort her in her despair and the raging of his own frustrated hopes.

"You presume a great deal when you assume that it is your side I would take, were I able to do so."

If she wept after he left, he did not remain to hear it. 

* * *

The journey from Orzammar to Redcliffe, in the company of a dwarven merchant, was torturous for them all. The full heat of late Solace was oppressive, and humid once they reached the lower elevations of the Frostback Mountains. Rìona began wearing her Dalish armor again, despite the scandalized looks it earned her whenever they encountered other people. It served her well, the day they encountered a band of mercenaries intent on claiming the bounty Loghain had placed upon their heads.

Rìona stood atop the cart, loosing one arrow after another into their foes. Zevran had to admit, Alistair might have a good idea with his obvious fetish for Rìona's pregnant shape. She looked savage and magnificent, the wind blowing wild wisps of her hair loose from her queue as she intently took aim and felled one mercenary after another from safely out of reach.

That battle, however, came at a cost. She began suffering pain again, as she had in Orzammar. The slow, jolting journey sitting on the ox-cart took its toll, and sleeping on the ground again was an ordeal for her. She became pale and wan from lack of sleep as the days passed. Dark rings formed under her eyes, while strained discomfort drew her face into a perpetual grimace.

They slept without tents, for there was no rain or cold from which they needed to shelter. Zevran heard her thrashing on her bedroll, unable to get comfortable. Even when the merchant offered to make her a pallet in the cart, with some extra blankets for padding, still she could not rest.

He yearned to go to her, to massage away her aches until she could sleep, to distract her from her troubles with pleasure, to assure her of his love. But he couldn't. He couldn't risk that Alistair might interpret such an act as an attempt on Zevran's part to interject himself between them. They had worked too hard, he and Alistair, to settle things between themselves, for Zevran to take such a chance now, when the trust and understanding they had found was so new and fragile.

Alistair was suffering also. Zevran knew that he, too, lay awake at night, listening to her toss and turn in the squeaking cart. Zevran could offer him no more comfort than he could offer her, however much he wished to. He could not fault Alistair, who wished to bestow upon Rìona all due honor, honor which she spurned. Indeed, it was difficult to say who Zevran pitied more. And so they each lay there, night after night on their lonely bedrolls, within feet of each other, and yet miles apart.

Leliana approached him, concerned that Rìona wasn't eating, wasn't talking, wasn't plotting politics as she should have been doing with their army finally gathered and the Landsmeet looming near. Zevran could provide her nothing by way of assurance. And it got worse when he discovered Rìona was not seeking any aid from Wynne for her discomfort, and that Wynne was afraid that the journey would prove too great an ordeal, that Rìona would go into labor before they reached Redcliffe.

But he could do nothing. Nothing! He wanted to shout at the Maker and all the cruel fates that had placed him in such a futile, useless position.

With the excruciatingly slow pace of the ox cart, it was over two weeks to Redcliffe. As the first week rolled into the second, another storm beset them, sweeping in over the foothills of the Frostback Mountains to their west. They nearly failed to make camp before the downpour began, pitching their disused tents at a frantic pace and stowing the gear they wished to protect from the deluge in the cart under a sheet of waxed canvas.

Alistair was resolutely pounding pegs for another tent for himself when the thunder began to roll ominously and the greenish-gray clouds flickered. Zevran caught his arm in a firm grip, before the mallet fell again.

"My friend. Do not make any decisions you will regret when tempers cool, and the obstacles do not seem so insurmountable. Set aside your anger. She is alone and afraid."

The look Alistair turned upon him was so raw, and full of torment, that Zevran found himself wishing he could offer Alistair more than a few sage words, born of the hard-won calm he'd had to cultivate during his training with the Crows. He cursed the damnable sense of nobility and obligation, that made Rìona so willing to sacrifice Alistair to the kingdom while she bore her disgrace alone.

Zevran wondered if he might not simply drug the two of them and drag them before a priest, semi-conscious.

Alistair stared at Zevran a long moment as the heavy drops of rain began to fall, while Zevran swept his arm in an inviting gesture to Rìona's tent across the way. With a muttered curse, Alistair tossed his mallet onto the cart and proceeded Zevran across the clearing.

It was physically impossible for Rìona to curl into a ball, and yet that was the impression Zevran had as Alistair pulled her tent-flap open. She was seated on her bedroll, hunched around herself, her eyes bleak and miserable. They brightened with hope and relief as she saw Alistair, and she opened her arms to him. By the time Zevran closed the tent-flap behind him, Alistair had drawn her into his lap as she buried her face against his chest.

"I'm sorry, Alistair," she whispered brokenly. "Maker, I'm so sorry."

"Shh," he kissed her head, stroking his face against her hair. "It doesn't matter right now. We'll work it out, I swear we will. We'll find a way."

For a moment, Zevran hovered near the entrance to the tent, wondering, not for the first time, if there was truly room for him in all this. But then Alistair's eyes met his and slid expectantly to the space beside Rìona. Zevran set such thoughts aside, and carefully maneuvered himself through the tight and awkward confines of the tent to take his place beside them. Rìona reached for him eagerly, clutching at him and they rode out the storm with her huddled between them, cringing when the thunder crashed, nearly shaking the earth with its fury.

As he always did, Zevran felt the life and vitality of the storm thrumming through him. On this, as with a surprising number of other things, he and Alistair were in perfect agreement. A storm was a wild, untamed thing, and Zevran itched to run headlong into it and dare its destructive power to touch him. Only Rìona's fear, and need for comfort, kept him in that tent.

Alistair started when Zevran's fingers brushed the base of his spine, above the waist of his breeches. His eyes opened to meet Zevran's over the top of Rìona's head in a moment of perfect understanding, and within them, hunger simmered in the twilit dimness inside the tent. Zevran maintained that touch, caressing slightly, enjoying Alistair's efforts not to react while Rìona was still so distressed. But as the thunder faded away into the distance, and the lightning stopped painting everything in eye-shattering flashes of light, she, too, became aware of the tension.

"Perhaps there is someplace private nearby where the grasses are tall and soft, where we might enjoy the gentle rain, now that the worst of the storm has passed?" It was to Alistair that he offered the proposal, as Rìona glanced back and forth between them, her breath catching in her throat. Alistair licked his lips and nodded, an eager, jerky gesture. Almost as an afterthought, he looked to Rìona, and she mirrored his nod.

"Maker, yes."

It was better than Zevran could have dreamed, sprawling in the rain-soaked grasses with the two of them, for contrary to everything he might have once assumed, Alistair was unabashed and unrestrained, once assured of privacy. They spread Rìona out between them, each of them sampling a breast as their fingers brushed together against the slickness of her sex. Alistair's delved within while Zevran's deftly manipulated her pearl until she arched and screamed between them.

Eventually, however, she begged to move, because lying supine made her back ache. He and Alistair turned their attentions to one another under her avid gaze. It was Zevran who found himself the aggressor this time, the frustration and concern since they had made ready to depart Orzammar goading him on as he pushed Alistair onto his back on the matted grasses and licked the drizzling rain from his muscled torso, swirling his tongue around the flat, hard nipples on their pad of flesh. His mouth blazed a trail down the sparse hair that tapered down his belly, before Zevran reached his cock, thick and rigid, with thin rivulets of rain and arousal mingling down its length.

Alistair's hips came up off the ground as Zevran took him into his mouth. "Blessed Andraste have mercy!" he groaned, burying his face against Rìona's hip where she sat beside his head.

Zevran took his time with it, taking pleasure in Alistair's mounting sense of urgency, in the muttered curses and restrained pushes of his pelvis. Zevran's oiled fingers slid carefully into him, and if Alistair stiffened, it was only very briefly before he gave himself over. When Alistair swelled and spilled into Zevran's mouth, he licked his lips with satisfaction before sliding back up Alistair's body and slowly, gently, pushing into him.

"Dear Maker, I had no idea!" he gasped, his face strained with pleasure. He evidenced no discomfort, for Zevran had been diligent in his preparations. Zevran claimed his mouth in a deep, messy kiss before rearing back and beginning to move.

Leliana and Shale were on watch duty when the three of them returned to camp . If the bard guessed at what they had been doing, or was scandalized, she said nothing, even when they all retired to Rìona's tent together. There, Zevran began teaching Alistair how to ease the aching of Rìona's back and hips with massage, carefully seeking out the most tender places and rubbing the pain from them.

"What are we going to do?" she murmured drowsily. "Not quite that hard, please."

"A little less pressure, my friend, like so," Zevran coached, and Alistair adjusted the way his fingers pressed into the base of her spine. "I feel I am at least partially responsible for your disagreement, for it was I who was so adamant that Alistair must wed you, _querida._ I will not see you shamed. In Antiva, society is very cruel in its dealings with women who bear bastard children. The higher the woman's standing, the harsher the recompense tends to be. A noblewoman of your rank, my dear, would not fare well at all. But... perhaps it is different here in Ferelden?"

"Huh," Alistair snorted. "I can tell you from the perspective of the bastard, it's no Summerday festival. My reasons aren't _entirely_ romantic nonsense, you know. This is my niece or nephew we're discussing here. I have an obligation to do right by the babe."

"You weren't acknowledged as you should have been, Alistair," Rìona argued. "I'll never understand why King Maric chose that, for it was a terrible injustice to you. Even without being able to claim Cailan's was the father of my babe, as a Cousland, I should be able to rear him with some semblance of the respect he's due."

"But that won't stop the whispers and the slurs and the fact that he's never _really_ accepted in polite company, or the way people gossip when they think he can't hear," Alistair protested. "You weren't raised that way, love. You don't know what it was _like_. He deserves better than that. This is _family_. If you're asking for me to pretend that doesn't matter, I can't."

"I won't let you lie," she insisted. "The Landsmeet convenes with an oath of integrity administered by the Grand Cleric, that all dealings within will be conducted in absolute good faith. Honesty before the Landsmeet is a sacred obligation. You _cannot_ claim the babe as your own before them. Especially not when our enemies have documented evidence that it's a false claim."

"Evidence they can't use, without undermining their own cause," Zevran pointed out mildly. Is your Queen Anora is so eager to reveal such a falsehood? Besides, you are too idealistic, _mi ciela_. Do you think your Loghain and Howe aren't lying through their teeth to your nobles, to keep up their reign?"

"And that would justify us doing the same?" Rìona gave a derisive sniff, dismissing the possibility. "I have said many times I will not stoop to use their weapons. For all my parents' schemes and seductions, this was one point on which my father was adamant. They may have employed... unconventional... means of persuasion to win allies, but my father never lied within the Landsmeet in all his years. I will bear this babe in shame before I violate the sanctity of the Landsmeet."

Zevran growled in annoyance.

"Who says we have to lie?" Alistair pulled his hands away from Rìona's back, resting them on his thighs as he knelt there behind her.

"Without Cailan's letter, any attempt to claim the babe is his will be considered highly suspect."

"So we don't say anything about Cailan unless someone asks directly. Other than that we just... let people believe what they want to believe. You're always telling me how Fereldans don't actually care what you do privately, so long as you don't carry on about it publicly. So as a matter of decorum, people should be restrained about asking, shouldn't they?"

"I think they might overlook such restraint when the child in question might be a potential heir to the throne. Someone is bound to ask; it's inescapable."

"If they do," Zevran cut in smoothly, meeting Alistair's determined scowl with a satisfied grin, "you tell the truth and dare the queen and her father to claim otherwise. They cannot do so without perjuring themselves, after all, and if the integrity of your Landsmeet is so sacrosanct as all that..."

"Oh, for the love of the Maker! Stop it, both of you! Alistair, for a man who has called me a couple times on splitting rhetorical hairs, I would expect better of you. You're not being rational about this—_either_ of you!"

Clumsily, Rìona pushed herself up to sitting and glared at them both, her eyes lingering particularly intently upon Zevran, as if to admonish him.

"Perhaps I wasn't, either, the last time we spoke of this, when the astonishment of losing Cailan's letter was so strong, if I didn't make this point emphatically enough." Sighing, she bowed her head. "It was a disappointment, I admit. I'd had... hopes, for us and my babe. It seemed for a moment everything I had secretly wished for was within my grasp. And now those hopes are unlikely ever to come to fruition. But that doesn't change what we must do.

"I appreciate, Zevran, that you don't wish to see me disgraced, or that you, Alistair, don't want the babe to be shunned for his birth. But that will be the least of our worries, if we cannot bring Loghain down. I'm far less concerned about my babe being born a bastard than I am about him being orphaned because we were hanged as traitors. In another year, this land will be entirely consumed by the Blight, and what will my disgrace matter then? So by Andraste's sweet mercy, will the two of you please quit acting like _men_ and begin attending to the greater issues here?"

Alistair spluttered indignantly, as Zevran looked into the censure in her eyes. She was right. He'd been so eager to shield her from shame, he'd lost sight of more practical matters. Strange. Such mindless romanticism was not his way. Perhaps he liked playing the gallant protector a little too well.

But enough was enough.

"She is right, my friend," he said softly, fending off Alistair's outraged look. "You know only too well how dearly I desire to see all that you hope for come to pass, but now is not the time. Later, perhaps, when the Blight is not so likely to kill us all, yes?"

Finally, Alistair nodded, hanging his head. The dejection on his face might have been amusing, if it weren't so tragic. Such a romantic, their templar, despite how far he had come. So eager was he to defend his lady.

Zevran could not fault him for that.

"Fine," he muttered at last. He drew a deep breath and lifted his gaze, setting his shoulders. "Then here's what I'll do. I'll take the damned throne, but I'm not going to give up on the chance that you might be able to rule beside me. You're the one who knows politics. I'm going to need you in this, and better it be as my wife than create a scandal as my mistress."

"I have no objection to that. So long as you don't lose sight of what we need to do, Alistair," Rìona replied carefully, and he gave a grim nod. "Then what are your thoughts?"

"Well, naturally, when we get to Redcliffe, Arl Eamon's going to have questions. We're going to tell him the truth, about Cailan and the letter. That babe is his grand-nephew. _He_ gets a blood connection to the throne, like he had with Cailan, if I make the babe my heir. So let's try to get him on our side, working for us. Maybe he can use some of his influence to make a case for you as queen. The last of the Couslands, the family wrongly murdered by Loghain and Howe's treachery. With or without a father you can name for your babe, that has to be worth something. And who knows? Maybe we'll get lucky and the babe will look sufficiently _Theirin_ to lay everyone's doubts to rest without any need of proof."

"All right. But Alistair, you have to be prepared if this doesn't go the way you're envisioning it. If Arl Eamon's goal is power, he's going to want as much influence over the king as he can manage. It won't be in his interest to see me at your side; he'll want to hand-pick your bride from amongst his allies. Likely, he already has a list as long as his forearm drawn up of potential queens for you."

"If that's the case, then we'll deal with it. Maybe I can placate him with the chancellorship or something, in exchange for his cooperation."

"Possibly. I just... I really can't emphasize strongly enough that we cannot take such an outcome for granted."

"I understand that, love. But this babe is possibly the only heir I'll ever have, since I might never have a child of my own. I think you can agree there are some politically sound reasons to fight for this. I promise... I won't be so stubborn that I destroy our cause over this point, if _you_ won't give up so damned easily."

Rìona fell silent for a long moment, and Zevran found himself nearly holding his breath, awaiting her decision.

"All right," she said at last. "We'll do it your way."

_Yes, we will play this your way, for now,_ Zevran thought much later that night, as he lay beside Rìona, pressing his thumbs into her lower back to ease the ache until she could finally sleep. _But be warned, my Wardens. I am under no obligations of honorable comportment for the sake of your nobility. I will not give up so easily on the plans we have laid, whatever I must do to bring it to pass._


	49. Chapter Forty Nine: Preparations

Being in disgrace, Rìona thought, smiling softly to herself, was almost a price worth paying, to see Arl Eamon's discomposure as the doors of his main hall swung open to admit her and Alistair into his presence. Despite his years as an accomplished politician, he didn't even try to mask his astonishment at the sight of her in her Dalish armor, her belly swollen before her.

"Maker's breath!" His shocked oath overrode Lady Isolde's scandalized gasp. He gawped, his mouth working like a fish's as he appeared to struggle between the dual impulses of demanding an explanation and solicitously offering her a chair.

Decorum won out over prurient curiosity. Barely.

"Lady Cousland, Alistair. Everything is... well? Your... journey was not too fatiguing, I hope?"

"As well as can be expected, my lord arl," she answered graciously, trying to quash her amusement. "Though the comfort of your castle certainly has its appeal at the moment, and some more current reports of the progress of the Blight than we were able to acquire in Orzammar would be even more welcome. How far have the horde spread? What news of Loghain's campaign? Have you sent your Declaration of Intent to the Seneschal of the Landsmeet so that he may summon the bannorn to appear?"

The arl shook himself, looking somewhat abashed at forgetting his business in his surprise. With a visible effort, he regrouped. "To answer your final question, I sent my declaration to the Seneschal the day after your courier arrived from Orzammar. He had to take the North Road, however, since so much of the south has fallen to the Blight, and likely won't be in Denerim for at least another week, and then it will be two or three weeks after that before a response from the Seneschal reaches us, informing us when he has decided to convene the Landsmeet. So, we must wait for now. We have much to discuss, my lady, but no doubt you and your company are all weary from your travels. I shall have my chamberlain show you to your rooms, where you may bathe and rest, and then we can convene in my study tomorrow and go over the news of the realm."

"Weeks!" Rìona protested. "Every day of delay, the Blight spreads further. Is there no way to hasten the process?"

"It will likely be three months or more, my lady," Arl Eamon replied with a small, indulgent smile. Suddenly, Rìona was reminded that the arl was the political veteran, not she. "Weeks would only account for the travel time of the couriers. The politics of the realm is a slow business, I'm afraid, even in such dire circumstances. It's nearly August. The harvest is not far off, and it's virtually certain the Seneschal will not convene the Landsmeet—even at my urgent request—when the bannorn are needed to oversee their freeholders' crops."

Slowly, Rìona nodded, the shape of greater events beginning to form in her mind. She'd been too long alone with her own personal concerns and impatience; she was beginning to lose sight of the more widespread issues. "Of course. With so much of our farmland falling to the Blight, we will need every hand in the fields that remain. A famine this winter is a virtual certainty, regardless."

"Precisely," Eamon said approvingly. "I've secretly sent word to my wife's family in Orlais, smuggled out among the refugees attempting to flee from Highever port, asking for assistance. If we can get the borders opened, they will send a caravan of stores from their own granaries to provision our army, for it's certain Ferelden will not have the means to do so. Besides, it appears a delay is perhaps... fortuitous, as far as you're concerned?"

Rìona's lips twitched. No doubt that was as delicate as he could manage to be while trying to ask if she was going to whelp right there in his hall, she thought wickedly.

"True, my lord arl," she acknowledged with an incline of her head. "I will be in a much better state to attend to politics come Harvestmere than I will be in August. But that, too, is discussion for after we have rested."

"Very well, then. My brother is overseeing his lands at Rainesfere. I shall send word to him immediately to join us here, so that we may discuss strategy."

If Arl Eamon's chamberlain found anything improper in the fact that Alistair made it clear he would not be requiring his own room, he said nothing, but merely excused himself with a bow as Rìona sank onto the bed with a groan of relief.

"Well, that went fairly well, I think," he remarked once they were alone. "How are you feeling, love?"

"Relieved, I suppose," she said after a moment of thought. "I knew it would take some time to actually call the Landsmeet together, but I still had a fear that I would have to choose between staying behind here at Redcliffe or attempting to rush all the way to Denerim before the babe is born. Either would have killed me, I think."

"If you can stop thinking of strategy and politics and logistics for a moment, I meant, are you in any pain?"

Rìona shook her head. "Nothing more than yesterday or the day before," she said nonchalantly. In truth, her pelvis ached terribly and the late-Solace heat was making her wretched. The gowns she had worn in Orzammar had seemed too hot and confining for the weather, but even the soft Dalish armor was beginning to chafe uncomfortably under her breasts and around her hips. The burden of the babe had dropped in the last couple days, making her lower back and hips agonizingly uncomfortable. Wynne had said it would likely be only two or three more weeks until the babe arrived.

Though it had only been two weeks since they left Orzammar, sleeping on a bed again was a welcome luxury. Rìona was asleep before Zevran came to their room that night. It spoke to her exhaustion that she could be roused only lightly enough to be vaguely aware of the two of them turning to each other for pleasure, as they did regularly now that her discomfort had dampened her own appetites. She drifted back to sleep to the sound of Zevran's voice murmuring encouragement in Antivan, followed by Alistair's low, needy groan.

She slept well that night, for the first time in months. There was something comforting about knowing she was in the place where she would have her babe, and that she would not be called upon to leave it until after she had done so. Rìona felt something inside her relax and begin to settle in, subtly adapting to prepare itself for the impending arrival of her child.

Sometime before dawn, Zevran awoke her with a kiss.

"It would not do to scandalize this arl whose support you need," he explained with a wicked smile that conveyed how very much he would enjoy creating exactly such a scandal in other circumstances. He rose from their bed, dressed and slipped from the room as silently as a wraith. In Zevran's absence, Alistair groggily sought her warmth and draped his arm over Rìona as she lay there, awaiting the start of the day.

She and Alistair were breaking their fast in their chamber when a knock sounded on the door, and Bann Teagan entered at Rìona's call.

As with their initial meeting with Arl Eamon, Rìona found herself quelling her own amusement, this time at the sudden change in Alistair's demeanor. None of the easy acceptance he displayed toward Zevran's presence was in evidence. His posture was rigid and forbidding as Rìona came to her feet when the bann entered the room, clearly waiting to see if Teagan would provide any sort of provocation for his latent possessiveness.

"Maker's breath!" Teagan said, stopping short and staring at Rìona in surprise. "Eamon had told me, but I must say, this is still quite an extraordinary surprise."

"Hello to you, too, Teagan," Rìona said with gracious humor. "Will you join us at our breakfast?"

"My apologies. Good morning, my lady." Remembering himself, Teagan offered her a bow. "Thank you, but I've already eaten with my brother this morning. Please, don't let me interrupt your own meal, however."

Alistair made a stilted gesture to an empty chair as Rìona sat, before he took his own seat at the table once more. Teagan paused a moment, clearly collecting his thoughts. He gave Alistair's tense face a measuring look, before venturing carefully, "Forgive my indelicacy, but I'm assuming by the fact that you mentioned nothing of this the last time you were in Redcliffe that there is... no _particular_ reason I needed to be informed?"

Rìona smiled as she bit into a slice of buttered bread. "No, my lord. I knew I was with child before we ever came to Redcliffe."

"Ah," he nodded thoughtfully, and Alistair began to relax a bit. "Cailan, then?"

Alistair's eyes widened. Obviously he hadn't been aware that she had confided in Teagan.

"Yes."

"Clearly you haven't informed Eamon of this fact, yet?"

"We will," Alistair answered succinctly. "I want his support to make Rìona my queen and name the babe as my heir."

'Well, _that_ will be an interesting conversation," Teagan replied drily, and Alistair snorted. "You'll have my support, of course. Cailan was my nephew; I would prefer to see his child given due recognition. But Eamon may be harder to sway. Right now he's in a panic that you've got Alistair prepared to claim some unknown man's mongrel as his own. So tell me, what are your plans?" 

* * *

"I didn't realize you'd told Teagan about Cailan," Alistair commented mildly after the bann had left.

"Yes, well, I'd nearly forgotten, myself. The first time we came to Redcliffe, when the village was no longer besieged, I found myself in need of a confidante. A confessor, really. I still blamed myself for Loghain's actions at Ostagar, and I felt... very much alone."

"And there I was, calling you a harlot." Alistair groaned. "Maker, love, how is it you've forgiven me for being such an arse back then?"

"I never thought you were," Rìona said quickly, but Alistair chuckled and shook his head.

He chuckled. "Really? Because I seem to recall you calling me something in the Fade. What was it now? A 'self-righteous prig?'"

"Yes, true, but I always admired your conviction," she conceded. Smiling, Rìona rose from her chair and rounded the table to slip—in her lumbering, ungainly way—into his lap. "You've come a very long way, my love," she murmured as his arms encircled her, and she rested her head on his shoulder. "We both have."

Alistair kissed her hair and sighed. "Whatever happens, love, I want to thank you. You've... freed me, in a lot of ways. Taught me to sort out my own convictions from the things I was told I should believe but never really did. Taught me to look out for myself. That's opened a lot of doors for me, even some I wasn't sure I wanted to go through."

"This sounds alarmingly like a preparation for a farewell."

"What? No! Definitely not, if I have anything to say about it!" He gave a low, fierce growl, his arms tightening around her. "It's only... I just needed to say that, before the thought gets swept away in the rush of everything we have to do. I wish we could just live in this moment for a while and enjoy what we have now, rather than worrying about the future. But even Zevran, whose entire philosophy centers around living in the moment, says when there's a babe involved, you can't help but look to the future. And so we've got to work with that. We'll do what we must to get through this, I know. But it frightens me, sometimes."

She kissed him, then, a gesture of comfort that quickly slid toward passion as his mouth slanted across hers, his tongue swiping across her lips, seeking entry.

When her mouth left his to trail kisses down his neck, he shuddered and asked, "How's your back? Your hips?"

"I find they're not bothering me nearly so much, after a good night's rest in a comfortable bed," Rìona answered, smiling slightly before taking his earlobe gently between her teeth. Alistair shifted slightly in his chair, and she felt his arousal against the backs of her thighs. "Though, I'm sure Arl Eamon is waiting for us to come down so that we can begin discussing our plans for the Landsmeet."

"Let him wait!" Alistair muttered, sliding an arm underneath her knees and surging to his feet, bearing her to the bed in determined strides. Laying her down upon it, he drew back to jerk his linen shirt over his head, as Rìona untied the sash of her dressing gown and let it fall open.

"Zevran didn't wear you out last night?" she teased as he dropped the shirt upon the floor and knelt upon the bed, looming over her.

Alistair ducked his head, smiling bashfully. "Woke you up, did we?"

"Only for a moment, much to my dismay." Rìona reclined upon the pillows as Alistair crawled over her, dipping down to kiss her lightly.

"In answer to your question, not a chance," he said firmly, moving off to the side and pushing her dressing gown the rest of the way open, allowing his hand unrestricted access. His hand cupped her breast, his thumb brushing across the nipple. "Do you realize I haven't been _inside_ you since before I left for the Deep Roads?"

"And here I thought I was the only one keeping count," Rìona sighed, then gasped, writhing as his fingertips lightly pinched the nipple he'd been stroking. His head came down, his mouth hot upon her other breast, tongue flicking against the nipple. Whatever reply he mumbled was lost, and Rìona moaned softly as he drew her nipple into his mouth and began to roll it between his lips.

A knock sounded upon the door to their bedchamber.

Cursing, Alistair pulled away. It took a moment for Rìona to collect herself enough so that her voice was composed, as she called, "Who is it?"

"Aggie Stark, my lady," a cheerful voice called from outside the door. "I'm Arlessa Isolde's seamstress. She thought you might need my services and sent for me."

"I'm going to throttle that woman," Alistair muttered direly, reaching for his shirt. With an effort, Rìona maneuvered herself off the bed and rearranged her dressing gown.

"Please, come in, Mistress Stark," she called as Alistair returned to the table where they had broken their fast and bit savagely into a chunk of cheese.

"I suppose this is the arl and arlessa's subtle way of disapproving of my Dalish armor," Rìona quipped as the seamstress bustled into the chamber. She willed herself to ignore the frustrated tension of arousal and the electric awareness thrumming along her nerves, making Alistair's every movement and gesture more distracting than they had any right to be.

"Begging your pardon, my lady, but perhaps the arlessa just wishes you to be comfortable?" the seamstress suggested. She was a tall, large-boned woman who moved with an oddly brisk, light energy that belied her size. "Though I did hear tell of someone passing through the village yesterday in outlandish armor that left her half-naked. Was that you?"

Rìona sighed, yielding. "I suppose it was. Well, Aggie Stark, there's no sense fitting me for gowns I won't need in a month's time. If my armor is too scandalous, I have a couple of gowns that were made for me in Orzammar that will do until the babe is born. Let's concentrate our efforts on a few loose, comfortable shifts for the lying-in, and gowns for after the babe is born, since I'll not be able to nurse him in my armor. And since this is all the arlessa's idea, _she_ can pay for it."

Alistair snorted a laugh from his chair, and Rìona turned an arch look upon him. "Don't think you're getting off so easily," she cautioned. "You'll need formal clothes as well, for the times when your armor won't do in Denerim."

Rìona smiled sweetly as Alistair groaned, and thought that if she couldn't spend the morning in bed with him, this wasn't an altogether unamusing alternative.

Her amusement fled, however, when there was another knock at the door, a servant summoning Alistair to attend the arl in his study. As she had in Orzammar, Rìona felt a sense of being marginalized. Did everyone but her own people just assume that with the birth of her babe so near, she wouldn't care about anything else? Or, was it more insidious than that? Surely it was only coincidence that had Arl Eamon sending for Alistair after the seamstress had arrived to distract Rìona. But, if so, why hadn't the arl's summons been for both of them?

"Should I wait?" Alistair asked uncertainly as Aggie Stark took Rìona's measurements.

She hesitated, tempted to say yes, before finally shaking her head. "No, it's best we not strain the arl's good graces. Go ahead. I'll expedite this process here and join you shortly."

As Alistair stood and straightened his clothing, trying to make himself as presentable as possible in his patched linen undershirt and breeches, Rìona beckoned the maidservant who had come to summon him.

"If your duties permit, please find Mistress Leliana and ask her to come see me."

The time it took for Leliana to arrive seemed interminable, as Rìona wondered just what was being discussed without her input in the arl's study. As she spoke with the seamstress, discussing what she and Alistair would need for clothing, Rìona dressed, defiantly bypassing the gowns that King Bhelen's consort had gifted her with for the sake of the Dalish armor again. Perhaps it wasn't wise to make Arl Eamon too uncomfortable, but if he thought she was going to sit idly by while he made all the plans to his satisfaction, then she would remind him precisely who it was who had been out there combating the Blight all these months.

She had just finished belting her war skirt around her hips when Leliana rapped softly on the door.

"Thank the Maker!" Rìona muttered. "Leliana, I can't reach my feet anymore. Help me with my boots and greaves and poleyns, please? I need to go attend to politics and strategy. While I'm gone, please confer with Mistress Stark here about a couple of gowns for me, and clothes for Alistair that will be suitable for court wear. Simple and elegant, _nothing_ that smacks of Orlesian styling, however. We don't want to give Loghain's paranoia any traction. Will you do that for me?"

The door to Arl Eamon's study was shut when Rìona rushed down the narrow stairs of the castle with more speed than was really advisable, but as she approached, she heard Alistair's voice raised in furious argument.

"I don't care what you've heard, I'm not going to sit idly while you imply that my intended wife is a liar and a harlot!"

It provided her the perfect opportunity to pretend no-one heard her knock.

"If this letter you claim to have seen were in our hands, it would be different, Alistair." The arl's back was to her as he paced behind his desk, gesticulating emphatically. Alistair stood facing him, his jaw tense, his arms folded over his chest, his eyes hard and angry. "But since that letter has rather inconveniently disappeared, I'm afraid all we have to go on is Lady Cousland's word."

Well. That settled the question of whether or not the timing of the seamstress' visit was coincidence.

"I wasn't aware the value of my word was in question, my lord arl," Rìona said calmly. The arl whirled to face her, his face tightening at the sight of her in her Dalish armor. "At least not among the allies gathered here in this room. Or has something changed over the months I've been out there trying to stop the Blight?"

Bann Teagan surged to his feet, hastening to offer Rìona his chair, which she took with a gracious air more suited to a gown than to her scandalous armor.

"Forgive me, Lady Cousland, but there have been many stories circulating from Denerim these past months regarding your family."

"Yes, Howe is accusing us of treason to justify his attack on Highever. We already knew this." Rìona let just a touch of impatience color her tone. "It's a complete falsehood, and you already know that or you wouldn't have allied yourself with me. So what of it?"

"Forgive me, but there's more to it than that. There are rumors about your mother." Rìona clutched the arms of her chair in a white-knuckled grip, as fury threatened to sunder her carefully cultivated calm and charming demeanor. "It's not the first time Howe has tried to spread this particular rumor about her—it was decades ago that he first made the claim that she had been an Antivan prostitute before your father wed her, but no one listened then. Howe was crude and not well-liked, and such gossip was... unseemly. Now, he's important, and his words have weight, especially when coupled with his accusations about your father being in collusion with the Orlesians."

Rìona made herself wait, to not reply with the first heated words to leap to her tongue. She waited as Alistair crossed the room to her and laid his hand comfortingly upon her shoulder.

"Your wife, my lord arl, has attended my mother's salons for years. Your family has eaten at her table. Rumor is one thing, but what does your experience tell you? Has there ever been anything in your dealings with my parents, and specifically with my mother—Andraste guide her soul—that would lend any credence to Howe's claims of profligacy?"

"No." Arl Eamon sighed, and bowed his head with what looked to be genuine respect. "Your parents were fine people, and your father's voice will be greatly missed in the Landsmeet. I never told you how sorry I was for your loss."

"Thank you, ser. But back to my point. I will not refuse to speak the truth simply because it might not be believed. You yourself encouraged King Cailan to annul his marriage to the queen and take a new wife. How do I know this? Because I saw the correspondence. Cailan showed it to me the day he made his offer of marriage. After his death, it was in the royal arms chest alongside the document in which he confirmed his _de facto_ betrothal with me. Both letters are now in Queen Anora's hands." Rìona gave a firm nod, confirming for Arl Eamon that he was likely to find no ally in the queen, if he was minded to make the attempt. "Why then are you so incredulous at the idea that your nephew might have taken your advice at last?"

"If it's a matter of credibility, I can attest to the fact that Lady Cousland spoke of her betrothal to the king when she first came to Redcliffe, barely a month after Ostagar," Teagan interjected.

"And I—and many others who survived Ostagar, I'm sure—can confirm that Lady Cousland spent a great deal of time with the king in the days before the battle." Rìona turned her head to give Alistair a narrow look, which he returned blandly, apparently unconcerned with the fact that he was treading perilously close to a lie of omission. "Much more than could be accounted for by any other explanation, considering she was merely a Grey Warden recruit with no military expertise to speak of."

"That may all be true," Arl Eamon argued, "but it's a matter of appearances. It's only been twenty years since the Grey Wardens were permitted back into Ferelden after being exiled for attempting to incite a rebellion. Now, to have not one, but both of the surviving Grey Wardens attempt to lay claim to the throne... I fear this will only feed into Loghain's claims that it was the Grey Wardens who betrayed our king."

"You raise no points I haven't already discussed with Alistair myself, my lord arl. But what would you have me do?" Rìona asked softly. "Deny my babe his birthright and allow him to bear the shame of being born a bastard because the lies of others have made speaking the truth _politically inconvenient?_ If it turns out that's the only way we can stop Loghain, then that is what I will do, but first I will try with all my might to be certain my child receives his due recognition. It is my obligation, not only as a mother, but because it was the express wish of our late king. Those of us who were loyal to Cailan have a duty to see it met."

Eamon nodded. "Assuming you're telling the truth about the child's paternity, yes, you're right, we do. But—and forgive me for being insulting—that is the material point, isn't it?"

"Are you accusing me of lying, ser?"

"No. I'm simply saying we have no proof, and this is a great deal to risk on an unsubstantiated claim."

"Is it?" Rìona met his stern look with absolute candor. "You intended to put Alistair on the throne long before my babe became an issue. Can the rumors Howe has been spreading hurt that cause, if he tries to assume the throne with me at his side? Yes, of course they can. But the fact that I carry the late king's heir can also potentially strengthen our cause. Let's assume for the moment that Loghain is intending to remain regent and not actually seize the crown for himself—a valid question, considering his emissaries to Orzammar are referring to him as 'King Loghain' these days. Her other merits as a queen aside, the one thing Queen Anora has not been able to provide the kingdom is an heir. If she remains on the throne, there will first be a struggle to see who will become prince-consort, and then if she is indeed barren, we'll still have a battle for the succession decades down the line when her rule is failing. Having just witnessed precisely such a conflict in Orzammar, I assure you that is one thing we do _not_ want for our nation. On the other hand, there's Alistair, who would come to the throne with his consort and heir already established, setting the stage for long-term stability in the realm."

"If the babe isn't Cailan's, we run the risk of turning the Theirin bloodline over to an unrelated heir," Eamon argued.

"That could just as easily be the case if Anora remains on the throne, or if Alistair takes the throne with another queen and proves unable to have an heir of his own," Rìona shrugged. "Frankly, at this point, I'm far less concerned with having a _Theirin_ on the throne than I am for the prospect of a smooth succession. There are no guarantees, my lord arl, and I'm quite done with having my honor questioned."

"And _I'm_ quite done with this entire discussion," Alistair interjected with a note of impatient finality. "The babe is my brother's child, and I will make him my heir if I can. So rather than debating that idea endlessly, we need to begin building our strategy around it."

Arl Eamon opened his mouth to argue the point and then closed it again, frowning. Rìona wondered how much of his protestation was due to the fact that this was lessening his potential control over Alistair.

_Just how many names did you have on your list of prospective brides for Alistair?_ she wondered, wisely holding her peace.

"Very well," the arl said grudgingly, seating himself at his own chair behind his desk. "Then let us turn our attention to matters of image and perception. With the company you have kept these last months, your credibility could be seen as suspect—not necessarily by me, but certainly by the nobility who will be trying to weigh our claims against Loghain's. The qunari I could perhaps understand; no doubt he's an able fighter. But an Orlesian bard? An Antivan assassin?"

"No. _No!_ That's enough," Alistair's voice rose in anger. "I will no more allow the integrity of our companions to be questioned than I'm going to allow Lady Cousland's honor to be impugned. That _assassin_ has placed his own life in grave danger to help us, and he's proven his loyalty dozens of times."

Rìona stared at him, stunned by his instant and adamant defense of Zevran, and Alistair hesitated a moment, as though afraid he might have said too much. Then he shook his head. "No. If anyone wants to question the company we've kept, they can start by explaining why they weren't beside us, when Rìona and I were the only ones trying to save this Maker-forsaken country from Loghain and the Blight."

Taken aback, Arl Eamon scrambled, clearly unprepared for Alistair's passionate loyalty to his companions, and once again, Rìona found herself ducking her head to hide a smile.

_If you thought to make him your puppet-king, my lord arl, you are in for a terrible disappointment._

* * *

Sitting and discussing politics all day was scarcely less of a trial than fighting darkspawn, Rìona decided some hours later, stretching as she rose from her chair after Arl Eamon graciously decided to end their conference to prepare for supper. He apologized that there would be no welcoming feast, to honor her and Alistair's success in their endeavor of gathering an army to fight the Blight. After the siege by the undead creatures so many months ago, Teagan had implemented rationing in Redcliffe and his own bannorn of Rainesfere in preparation for provisioning an army, and Arl Eamon had maintained the measure once he had revived from his illness. Even the arl's family was eating very simply these days.

Still, as a matter of form, supper would be a slightly more elaborate affair than it was most days. There was no way Rìona could refuse to attend without appearing rude. And so she let Alistair escort her to their room where she could change into one of her dwarven-made gowns before spending another two hours sitting at the interminable supper Arlessa Isolde had planned to greet them.

Leliana graciously agreed to entertain them after supper, but Rìona was beginning to ache from sitting too long and soon pleaded fatigue. Alistair was only too eager to help her back to their room, and she found her weariness melting away at the eager gleam in his eye, which suggested he had not forgotten the untimely interruption they had suffered that morning.

For someone with far more experience removing her armor than feminine garments, Alistair managed to have Rìona bare and at the mercy of his questing mouth and hands in an astonishingly short amount of time after the bedchamber door shut behind them. The playfulness that had driven him earlier had given way to something far more intense, however, as he brought her to the brink of climax with his tongue and fingers. She wasn't entirely certain how she ended up on her knees, holding the headboard to keep her upright as Alistair slid into her hard and sure. He rested his forehead against her shoulder, moaning softly.

"I'll never give this up," he swore, wrapping his arms around her, his hands stroking down her belly. "I _can't._"

And then he began to move, surging up into her in a gentle, almost tidal motion that rocked Rìona forward. She thought she might like to stay like that forever, surrounded by Alistair, filled by him, driven by his patient, careful thrusts.

"Is this all right?" he muttered before seizing her earlobe gently between his teeth.

"Maker, yes!" She gasped as his fingers closed firmly upon her nipple. His other hand came around her hip, barely making the reach around her belly, and with just a few small caresses she was thrashing in his arms, biting back screams. And when the rippling waves had passed, the dam of Alistair's conscientious control burst. Those gentle, tidal surges became thundering, storm-driven waves crashing against the shore. She rode out the rampage, crying out as each thrust brought her to the edge of _too much_ before Alistair pulled back for the next assault. The moment when he clutched her close and groaned into her hair, spilling himself deep within her, was a mingling of relief and regret.

Rìona lay her head against the wall above the headboard, catching her breath as Alistair moved away to avoid resting his weight on her. Then gentle hands were there, drawing her away from the headboard and urging her to lie down and get off her knees. Zevran's eyes when she met them were at once hot with desire and meltingly tender.

"How long have you been here?" Alistair asked, still sounding breathless as he let himself collapse onto the bed beside Rìona.

"Mm, long enough to feel very lucky indeed," Zevran answered with an enigmatic smile, and slid into bed beside her. Suddenly overcome by weariness, Rìona lay with her head upon his shoulder, and after a moment, Alistair curled against her back, draping his arm over both of them.

If he mustered a response to Zevran, she wasn't awake long enough to hear it. She drifted easily to sleep with the thought _lucky, indeed_ echoing in her mind.


	50. Chapter Fifty: Labors

Politics gave way to practicality, once Alistair, Rìona, Arl Eamon and Bann Teagan had hammered out the basics of their strategy for the Landsmeet. That only took a few days, and thereafter, Alistair had little to occupy his time. Rìona, Eamon, and Teagan were hard at work composing correspondence to their allies and potential allies within the Landsmeet. These letters would go out before the Fereldan nobility left their respective holdings to converge upon Denerim, and would argue the preliminary case against Loghain's regency, citing Loghain's atrocities and lack of legitimate claim. Rìona assured Alistair this was typical—tentative alliances were often formed this way months in advance of a special session of the Landsmeet.

Rallying support against Loghain was Eamon and Teagan's purpose with their letters. Rìona's was somewhat different. She was to share the tale of Howe's treacherous attack on Highever with prospective allies, and erode Loghain's support by calling into question the honor and integrity of his top advisor. She was also to make a point of emphasizing how she, scion of the first and most notable family betrayed by the Loghain/Howe regime, had set aside her personal tragedy and quest for justice to become a Grey Warden and attend to the business of the Blight. _She_ had not sat safe in Denerim, playing at politics and grappling for power while darkspawn ravaged the southern half of Ferelden. The message her letters carried was simple: Ferelden must unite against the Blight, or be lost, and Loghain and his advisor Howe could not be trusted to attend to the Blight as they ought. Therefore, she humbly beseeched the recipient to consider casting his lot in with Arl Eamon and the Grey Wardens, come the Landsmeet.

They made no mention of Alistair, for doing so would seem self-serving. No. That would be a revelation for the Landsmeet, once Loghain's rule was ended and it was time to turn their attention to choosing a new ruler.

Once that endeavor began, there was little for Alistair to do, and so he sought to help in other ways.

Much of the land in the arling of Redcliffe was rocky and untillable, and therefore the village's primary industry and food source came from Lake Calenhad and the abundant fish-life to be found in the huge lake. This summer, the fishing boats trawled the waters non-stop, bringing in far more fish than could possibly be needed to feed the village and maintain its commerce. This surplus was being salted and dried and turned into rations to feed the army that would soon be converging upon Redcliffe. More smokehouses had been built to preserve the dried strips of fish, and the village reeked as the women worked over huge bonfires, rendering fish oil into salves and poultices which would treat the wounds of fallen troops.

It was to this endeavor that Alistair lent his aid, though he had little experience with it. When he'd left for the monastery, he'd been too young to work the fishing boats that plied the lake's waters. Nonetheless, he insisted on being taught what to do and accompanying the boats each day. Though calloused from years of holding a sword, soon his fingers and palms bore blisters from hauling ropes and huge nets laden with flailing fish.

Though he had not intended to do so, he quickly discovered that a benefit to morale came with his making a point to include himself in the workings of the village. Redcliffe, as center of the resistance to Loghain's rule, abode under the grim prospect of war. To see one of the Grey Wardens, who would be leading them in that war, working beside them, sharing in their common labors, was a powerful motivator that helped bring the people of the village closer together in unified purpose.

It helped even more that others of his company were participating, as well. Wynne was lending her knowledge of herbalism to the gathering of herbs and preparation of salves. Leliana joined the village's bowmen in venturing into the hills to hunt the bountiful game to be found there as the wildlife migrated north ahead of the Blight, until more smokehouses were packed with wild boar, venison, and even bear meat. Tanners and leatherworkers and cobblers were paid to travel from other villages to work the hides into armor and boots.

Alistair was startled when Zevran began joining him on the fishing boats, without any discussion of his intention to do so beforehand. It was a reaction to which Zevran merely rolled his eyes.

"What, shall I sit in the castle, weaving?" he scoffed, leaping nimbly from the dock to the deck of the low fishing boat. "Besides, the heat will be much more bearable on the water than indoors, yes?"

That was a very good point, Alistair conceded. He certainly had no objections to the company, as he admired the seamless way Zevran inserted himself into the fishing crew. If they thought it strange that an Antivan elf had hopped aboard their boat and started working, no one ever said anything. And, Alistair thought, scratching the back of his neck, it wasn't exactly a hardship to watch Zevran, shirtless in the August sun, cracking a bawdy joke and hauling on nets as his skin reclaimed the deep tan that had gotten considerably lighter during their months underground.

Alistair found himself on the receiving end of one of Zevran's famed massages, also, when his own skin turned bright red and blistered under that same merciless sun. He lay with his head on Rìona's thigh as Zevran carefully applied the soothing balm Wynne provided to take away the horrible burn. Alistair discovered the pain seemed less and less important as he did so, especially when Zevran's mouth sought out the parts of him that _weren't_ burned and devoted a different sort of attention to them.

It was a strange time. For all that the village he'd grown up in was completely familiar, it no longer felt like home—if it ever had done so in the first place. Yet there was a strange sense of domesticity that seemed to settle over all of them as they found their places in the daily affairs of Redcliffe. Their labors were oddly mundane after all they had done these past nine months, for all that those same labors were so crucial to the overarching state of affairs. There were no darkspawn to contend with, no bandits, no demons, and only the occasional scavenging pack of wolves, worrying the livestock as the Blight drove them north in search of prey.

It was... peaceful. It was the sort of reprieve they had only touched upon, that one isolated day as they left the Brecilian Forest. He saw that sense of peace reflected in Rìona, as she settled in to write her letters and await the coming of her babe. There was a new softness about her manner, a gentle calm that had been absent all these months as she fretted over the enormity of their task and her own limited ability to meet it. Maker, the loving, even wifely way she _smiled_ at him and Zevran when they returned to the castle in the evening, made the blisters and sunburn worth it.

It seemed also, somehow, important to take note of the fact that though all was in turmoil around them, the daily business of living still went on, relatively untouched by the greater scheme of affairs. _This_ was the Ferelden they were fighting to save, the Ferelden that would be consumed if they didn't manage to stop the Blight.

They had been in Redcliffe nearly three weeks, and were approaching the docks as the sun began to cast long shadows from the west, when Zevran went unnaturally still as he worked on coiling a rope alongside Alistair.

"What is it?" Alistair asked, puzzled by his sudden change in demeanor.

He gestured to the docks, where Alistair saw Leliana awaited them, her hands clutched before her. "I can think of only one reason for the bard to come to the docks to greet us, and that is if there is news she felt we needed to know before we returned to the castle."

Alistair groaned, fear tightening his gut. "Oh, Maker!"

Rìona had been particularly restless and uncomfortable the night before, giving up on sleep entirely because pacing the bedchamber was the only way to relieve the strain on her back. Alistair and Zevran had both been too exhausted from their work on the fishing boats

He was off the boat almost before it nudged the docks, jumping down with more haste than grace to rush to Leliana. Zevran was scarcely a step behind him. "Has she had the babe?"

"I only returned from hunting an hour ago, but apparently she's been laboring most of the day. Wynne says it could still be many hours yet, however."

Nodding once, Alistair took off at a jog down the docks, toward the village and the steep road that would lead him up the cliff to the castle.

"I'm not to let you return to the castle!" Leliana called urgently after them.

_"¿Que carajo?" (1)_ He heard Zevran mutter beside him as Alistair stopped to glare at her.

"To the Void with that!"

"Wynne doesn't want you underfoot, pestering her for information on how Rìona is doing," Leliana explained. "She recommended you go to the tavern and wait."

Alistair was on the verge of replying hotly just what Wynne could do with _that_ suggestion when he felt Zevran's hand on his arm.

"You may tell our Wynne no one will _pester_ her," Zevran said calmly. "But know that nothing short of the archdemon suddenly appearing over Redcliffe will keep us from that castle this night. Come, my friend. We shall raid your arl's wine cellar and get well and truly drunk while we await the good news, yes?"

_That_ sounded like a truly excellent notion.

"Maker, yes!" Alistair agreed fervently, and set off toward the castle again. 

* * *

When Zevran proposed they raid the wine cellar, he wasn't joking. Alistair lost count of the precise number of bottles they "liberated" from Arl Eamon's stock, particularly when his vision began to swim and double. Somehow it wasn't enough to prevent the hours from seeming endless. They set up camp in a cozy parlor near the castle armory and the family chapel, someplace with easy access to the stairs that led down to the dungeons and wine cellars, and refused to move, even when supper was announced. Oghren sat with them for a bit, but their grim tension was irritating to him, and he soon declared he'd have more fun getting drunk alone. Teagan joined them after supper for a couple of toasts but as the night wore on, well into the small hours of the morning, it was Alistair and Zevran alone who maintained their vigil.

The longer it took, the more ominous the wait seemed, despite the fact that Wynne, or the village midwife, occasionally came down to report that all was still well.

It was well after midnight when Alistair dosed drunkenly for a short time, only to awaken to find Zevran gone. His first thought was that there had been news, and he was halfway to the stairs before he realized Zev would have woken him, if that had been the case.

No, there hadn't been news yet. No doubt Zevran had simply gone to retrieve another bottle of wine. Deciding a walk would help clear his head and wake him up, Alistair began to wander the hallways near the parlor they had claimed. It was then that he passed the chapel and heard the unmistakable murmur of an Antivan prayer.

He paused in the open doorway to see Zevran kneeling and lighting a votive candle at the feet of the small statue of Andraste, his prayer almost too low to be heard.

Alistair felt his throat tighten. Wordlessly, he crossed the chapel to kneel beside Zevran, who fell silent when he realized he wasn't alone.

Bowing his head, Alistair took up the Chant.

_Many are those who wander in sin,  
Despairing that they are lost forever,  
But the one who repents, who has faith  
Unshaken by the darkness of the world,  
And boasts not, nor gloats  
Over the misfortunes of the weak, but takes delight  
In the Maker's law and creations, she shall know  
The peace of the Maker's benediction.  
The Light shall lead her safely  
Through the paths of this world, and into the next.  
For she who trusts in the Maker, fire is her water.  
As the moth sees light and goes toward flame,  
She should see fire and go towards Light.  
The Veil holds no uncertainty for her,  
And she will know no fear of death, for the Maker  
Shall be her beacon and her shield, her foundation and her sword._

_"Que así sea." (2)_ Zevran said softly in benediction.

They knelt there silently for some time, until Alistair finally remarked, "You weren't just having me on, when you said you were devout."

Zevran shrugged, pushing himself to his feet. "My relationship with the Maker is a strange one. And tonight, for the first time in many years, I find myself hoping He is not put out by that fact."

Alistair shuddered as he stood. "Don't even joke about that."

"I assure you, _cariño_, it is no joke."

Zevran's eyes were full of naked concern when Alistair met them, raw and unmasked. It was the least guarded he'd ever seen Zevran, in that moment of shared fear.

Suddenly Alistair was glad—immeasurably glad—that Zevran was there with him. Glad to have someone who understood just how bloody _terrified_ he was right now.

Women died every day in childbirth. True, those women certainly never had the benefit of a healer like Wynne at their side, but still. The fear of such a thing coming to pass would never truly be gone until he saw her again, alive and well with the babe in her arms.

Zevran understood that, and shared his fear. That made it easier, somehow.

"What will we do?" he asked Zev softly. "If the worst should happen, I mean?"

Zevran shook his head. "Tch. It does us no good to dwell on such things, and some would say it tempts fate."

"But still I have to ask," Alistair persisted, suddenly compelled. "What will you do, if something happens to her? Would you... go?"

To his own surprise, Alistair realized the question hurt. By an unspoken mutual decision, he and Zevran didn't discuss the _why_ of their new understanding. It was working, better than Alistair had ever imagined it would. They were all happy, and that was enough. Alistair surprised himself with how easily he'd adapted to it, considering how unthinkable it once had been to him.

Until tonight, the rest hadn't seemed to matter.

Did Zevran only tolerate him to be close to Rìona? Would he leave, if Rìona were no longer there?

"Is that what you would want?" Zevran asked, all casual arrogance. "After all, if she is gone, there is no reason for you to keep me around, yes?"

"What?" Alistair's voice rose in shock and echoed intimidatingly in the midnight silence of the chapel, making Alistair cringe and bring it back down to a more reverent pitch. "That's not what I'm saying at all!"

Zevran shrugged, unconcerned. "Why not? I am not a man whose company you would ever have sought, in other circumstances."

"Maybe not," Alistair acknowledged with a self-effacing shake of his head. "But if so, it's only because I was an idiot. Until recently, I've never known _what_ I wanted, much less how to actually go after it. I'd like to think I've gotten a bit smarter, lately. All I know is, these last few weeks have been important to me. And if the worst happens tonight... I wouldn't want to lose you, too."

For a moment, Alistair wished he had Zevran's gift for masking himself, because he felt foolish and vulnerable, putting himself out there like that. He always did that: wear his emotions naked upon his sleeve, give too much away. But he never seemed to be able to stop himself, until the truth welling inside him had been gracelessly blurted out.

"Forgive me," Zevran murmured, bowing his head as the uncaring mask slipped away. "I did not mean to be cruel. I should not have assumed... Ah! One would think I would know better by now."

"Better than what?"

"You must understand. I was raised amongst those who sold the illusion of love, and then taught to harden my heart for the kill. To... care... is to make oneself vulnerable. It is reckless. Better to take one's pleasures as they come, and never expect more. And so I tried to do exactly that, with her, when such was what she said she wanted. And you see how well that worked out."

"Then it's true. You're only here because of Rìona." Maker, he'd been a fool. Zevran had seemed to enjoy himself so much, these past weeks. Nausea churned in Alistair's gut at the idea that Zevran had only been _indulging_ him.

"No, no! That is not what I am saying!" Zevran denied quickly. "Let me explain. It caused me a great deal of confusion, to have such feelings for her when everything I have ever learned told me that what I felt was dangerous and wrong. And I was foolish, to assume I could do with you what I failed to do with her, when the two of you are opposite edges on the same blade. But... I was not certain you did not merely tolerate me for her sake. And now here we are, and it turns out you still wonder the same thing about me."

Almost reluctantly, Alistair laughed, relieved and reassured.

"In answer to your question, no," Zevran announced, something resolute in his voice. "I would not leave, unless you wished me to go."

"I'm glad." Alistair made no effort to disguise his relief, and Zevran offered him one of the sincere, unguarded smiles that he parted with so rarely.

Alistair turned at the sound of a throat being cleared gently behind them, to see Leliana standing in the doorway of the chapel. Her eyes were exhausted, but her smile was bright.

"You may see her now."

It was impossible to say which of them began running first. If Alistair went through the door to Rìona's bedchamber first, it was only because Zevran held back, remembering at the last instant the need for discretion. Two of Castle Redcliffe's maidservants were tidying the room under the direction of the village midwife, gathering blood-stained linens that were spread out on the floor near the foot of the bed, while the midwife untied a sheet that had been knotted around the canopy frame overhead with its ends trailing down.

The sight of all that blood terrified him in a way that nothing he'd ever encountered in battle had, and Alistair's eyes quickly sought Rìona out for assurance that she was all right.

She looked horrible.

Her hair hung in sweat-soaked tendrils around her face, which was pale and drawn. Not even after their worst battles had she looked so wrung-out.

He'd never seen a more beautiful sight in his life.

In her arms, she held something impossibly small, wrapped tightly in linen swaddling, its head crowned in pale, flaxen wisps.

And her eyes! Maker, the fierce, exultant joy _burning_ in her eyes as she smiled tiredly at them.

"Come!" Wynne said briskly to the midwife and the maids, bustling them out the door. "Let's allow Lady Cousland to get some rest. Alistair, find somewhere else to sleep tonight. Zevran, Leliana, don't stay too long. She needs to rest while the babe is still drowsy and isn't demanding to nurse all the time. I'll check on you in the morning, child."

"I'll come with you," Leliana murmured, and made her exit with Wynne, leaving just the three—four—of them alone.

In tandem, he and Zevran approached the bed. The closer they drew, the more ridiculously small the babe in her arms seemed. Maker, how could such a tiny thing live?

"A girl," Rìona said softly, reaching for Alistair's hand. "Caila Eleanor, I shall call her."

Zevran crawled lightly onto the bed, brushing back the linen draped over the babe's head with a finger. How did he dare, when the babe was so small and fragile-looking?

She was awake, Alistair realized, staring intently at Rìona with eyes so dark a blue, they seemed almost black. Her face was red and blotchy, scrunched and wrinkled, and yet...

"She _looks_ like Cailan!"

"Yes, she does, though Wynne tells me that could change as she grows." Rìona slanted an amused glance at him. "You may sit, if you wish."

Alistair hesitated. "I wouldn't want to jostle you, or hurt her."

"Nonsense. Come closer, my love."

Carefully, he eased himself onto the bed beside her, and Rìona leaned her head against his shoulder. "She's so _small!_"

"Huh, she didn't _feel_ small," Rìona replied wryly. "Wynne says she's actually a very robust size, considering some of the deprivations we suffered in our travels. I'm sure spending the last few months in Orzammar and here in Redcliffe helped on that front, at least."

"And how are you feeling, _querida?_" Zevran asked, nudging one tiny pink fist that had worked its way out of the swaddling with his finger. Astonishingly long, thin fingers tipped with perfect miniature fingernails wrapped around his and clutched tightly. "Ah, strong girl!"

Alistair couldn't describe what the sight of Zevran's dark finger engulfed by the babe's small pale ones did to him, but he found himself swallowing against a sudden tightness in his throat.

With the finality of a door closing behind him, he felt it click together. They were a family now. All of them.

"Sore," Rìona replied with a tired chuckle. "Wynne says in the absence of any injury, we should use healing magic sparingly and let nature take its course, as it could cause problems should I ever wish to have another child. I didn't have the heart to tell her how unlikely that was. Would you like to hold her?"

"Yes, I think I would," Zevran replied, as though surprised by the realization. As ever, his hands were deft and skillful as he carefully plucked the babe from Rìona's arms and braced her against his knees, one hand under the back of her head. Those large, dark blue eyes stared at Zevran with the same unfocused intensity that they had at Rìona. The babe seemed calm and content to rest there, staring at him, but Zevran kept her only a moment before offering her to Alistair.

Zevran's low voice had a husky edge to it. "Come, my friend. Hold your daughter."

_His daughter..._

"I'm afraid I'll break her," Alistair muttered, fighting against the tightness in this throat, ducking his head to hide the moisture in his eyes, but he let Zevran lay the tiny babe in his arms nonetheless. Instinct made him draw her close to his body, his arm under her head supporting it. She looked up at him as though confused by the appearance of another new face. Under that steady, slightly cross-eyed regard, something shifted. The entire world slid off-kilter.

Suddenly, it felt as if _he_ were the one who had just been born, falling into those eyes.

She didn't seem distraught until his shirt brushed her cheek. She turned her head toward him, her mouth open and working. She rubbed her face frantically against his chest and began to make small, angry noises.

"That's my signal," Rìona said with a smile, retrieving the babe from Alistair's arms. Alistair watched, enraptured, as she unlaced her clean white shift and lifted her breast out. Cradling the babe, Rìona brushed her mottled cheek with her nipple, and the babe turned unerringly toward it, drawing a wince and a gasp from Rìona as her seeking mouth latched onto it.

He'd never seen a more amazing sight. Alistair knew he was staring, but he was unable to help himself. The perfect, transcendent, incandescent peace on Rìona's face as she suckled the babe, he could never have imagined. It was as though all the concerns and doubts she'd carried with her all the months he'd known her simply melted away. Her eyes drifted shut and she exhaled a long sigh, leaning back into the pillows propped behind her.

"I think it is time for us to retire," Zevran murmured, and Rìona's eyes only came open half-way, drowsy and heavy-lidded.

"I agree," Alistair said with a nod, rising from the bed. He bent to press a kiss to Rìona's brow, and she blinked sleepily at him as he straightened to make way for Zevran to do the same.

"I love you," Alistair said, laying his hand along her cheek. She nuzzled her face into his palm for a moment, but her eyes fell closed again before she could answer.

"Good night, _mi amor,_" Zevran whispered. "Come, Alistair, you may sleep in my room tonight."

He and Zevran were both silent and solemn as they made their way down the hallway to Zev's room. Strangely, for all the wine they'd imbibed, neither of them was the tiniest bit drunk.

Alistair felt... too full. There were a hundred emotions churning inside him, chafing against the inside of his skin as though trying to escape, scouring him raw. He had no idea how to give them vent. He wanted to fall to his knees and sob, and he wanted to dance on the castle parapets, shouting his jubilation to the sky.

Did Zevran feel the same, he wondered. Did he feel this mad combination of exhilaration and love, joy and relief, fear and fierce protectiveness that told him he would utterly _destroy_ anything that attempted to harm Rìona or that tiny babe, without even an instant of hesitation?

It didn't make sense. There was absolutely nothing different about tonight, nothing that altered any of the plans they had been laying for weeks or even months now. And yet... everything was different. The world felt like an entirely new place, where everything took on a new significance. The Blight no longer threatened strangers whom Alistair would never meet. It threatened that precious child he'd held only for a single, life-altering moment.

He wanted to say something, and yet there was nothing he could say that would do justice to all this wonder inside him. He wished Zevran would speak, that he would tease him or crack a joke, but Zev was silent as they undressed for bed. Alistair slid under the covers as Zevran snuffed the candles, and only then did he realize that the first gray pre-dawn light was already touching the sky outside. They had kept their vigil all night.

"I, ah, don't think we'll be making it to the fishing boats today."

Zevran chuckled as he got into bed, rolling to face away from Alistair. "I daresay not."

A long moment of silence fell between them as Alistair fought to put into words what was beating inside his mind.

"Everything's different now. Isn't it?"

Zevran took a long moment to answer, and Alistair didn't think he was imagining the ragged edge to his voice when he did so.

"Yes. Everything."

He didn't know what made him move closer to Zevran, to touch his shoulder tentatively. That sort of easy affection they shared with Rìona... they still didn't do that with each other. Alistair, because he was afraid it wasn't really welcome, and Zevran because unguarded intimacy did not come easily to him. And yet, Alistair felt he had to touch him, had to _connect_ with Zevran, the one person in all the world who understood the moil of wild, wonderful, panicked, turbulent feelings chasing around inside him.

He stiffened for a moment, but just as Alistair was on the verge of withdrawing his hand, Zevran sighed and relaxed. Cautiously, Alistair slid his arm around Zevran and pressed closer to his back.

It felt strange. It felt good. It felt like something he should probably think about.

Sleep claimed him before he had a chance to think about it too hard.

Translations:

(1) "What the fuck?"

(2) "So may it be."


	51. Chapter Fifty One: Imperatives

It was harder than she could have possibly dreamed, handing her babe to the waiting arms of a wet-nurse.

For the first week after Caila Eleanor—whom Rìona quickly took to calling Ella—was born, she flatly refused to do so. She had, perhaps, allowed herself to become complacent in the idea that with the Blight and an almost-certain famine looming, there would be no wet-nurses available when the time came. She'd had it in her mind that she would be allowed to have a traditional lying-in. She couldn't describe how jealously protective she felt of her time with Ella; the idea of turning over caring for the babe to another was maddening.

But, as it happened, one of the village women had been delivered of an early and stillborn babe only a week before Rìona gave birth. She'd been helping to suckle some of the other babes in the village at need, but if she didn't find employment as a wet-nurse soon, her milk would dry up and the opportunity would be lost entirely.

Still, Rìona resisted.

"I _can't_, Wynne!" Rìona said desperately, clutching Ella protectively to her breast. It seemed strange to think that not long ago, she'd been in a panic over the prospect of the Blight continuing unabated while she was held back by her pregnancy. Now, it seemed impossible that anything could be more important than these precious early days with her babe. The feel of Ella in her arms, the peace that suffused her when the babe suckled, the smell of that downy head when Rìona nuzzled her face against it... the idea of giving even a moment of that up _ached_. "Please! A few more days, at least!"

"You've always known this day would come, child," Wynne said, not unkindly. "I understand all too well how hard it is. I felt the same on the day the templars took my babe from my arms and delivered him to the Chantry. I'm sorry. Normally I would not encourage putting a babe to a wet nurse until a full forty days had passed, since suckling helps speed a woman's recovery from the ordeal of childbirth. But you are a Grey Warden, and you have a greater responsibility than most women will ever know. The Blight will not wait, not even for this."

"Surely a few days isn't so much to ask!" Alistair argued. He looked ill at the sight of her distress.

"If we wait too long, we may have no nursemaid to suckle the child, and then it will be a choice between the babe's life, or Rìona's duties as a Grey Warden," Wynne said sternly. "Do you wish to make that decision, Alistair?"

"No, of course not."

"Arl Eamon proposes leaving for Denerim within a fortnight. Who knows what we will face when we get there? Fortunately for us, the wet nurse has no other ties to Redcliffe and will be able to accompany us to Denerim. But we must act now, before she loses her milk."

Wynne kept Rìona pinned under that chiding look until at last, she sighed and nodded. Wynne was right, she knew. Rìona was being utterly unreasonable. And yet...

She hadn't known it would feel this way, as though she were being asked to part with a limb, rather than a babe. Every instinct within her struggled against the idea. She wondered if this was how templars felt, once they were addicted to lyrium. It was an agony too fierce to comprehend.

"Very well," she said, ducking her head to hide the tears which came so readily to her eyes. "Have the woman come in the morning. She may nurse Ella during the day so that I can begin to prepare for our departure for Denerim, and I'll care for Ella at night."

The woman, Muirne, turned out to be a village lass not much older than Rìona herself. She'd been wed only half a year before her husband was killed in the initial onslaught of undead which had besieged Redcliffe during Connor Guerrin's possession. She hadn't even known she was with child yet when she lost her husband, and then she lost her babe as well. There was a great deal of sorrow in her eyes, and she was genuinely happy to have the opportunity to care for another infant. She had no family save an older sister who lived in a neighboring village, and Muirne was only too glad to have the opportunity to leave Redcliffe, which held so many memories of loss for her.

Still, it hurt beyond anything Rìona could have imagined to lay Ella in her arms. Muirne smiled at the babe, and when Ella rooted at her bodice, she sat in a chair and guided Ella to her nipple.

Rìona turned away, tears burning her eyes.

"How do you feel?" Wynne asked gently. It was the first time Rìona had risen from bed, for longer than it took to use the privy, in the week since Ella had been born.

"Still a bit sore," Rìona replied, moving experimentally.

"That I can help with. It should be safe enough to use a small touch of healing magic on the worst of your aches. Come, child. We'll get you to the baths, and then you can go about the business of ending this Blight so that Ferelden is safe for your Ella."

Being clean and relatively pain-free did little to alleviate the pang Rìona felt when she returned to her chamber to find Ella sleeping peacefully on the bed while Muirne plied a spindle in a nearby chair, making the thread that would be woven into linen for bandages. As with the rest of the village, she, too, was contributing to the preparations for war.

Seeing it, Rìona resolved herself to make the best of the situation and do what she knew needed to be done. Lacing herself into her Dalish armor and shouldering her bow, she made her way down the stairs to the courtyard where the knights of Redcliffe trained.

The weight of the men's eyes upon her as she walked down the steps of the castle into the courtyard was daunting, making her feel self-conscious. At first, she assumed it was simply her Dalish armor, until one of them bowed deeply and made room for her at the target range.

"May I get you some practice arrows, Warden?"

"Thank you," she murmured, beginning to understand.

Most of them had seen her, in those weeks before Ella was born. They knew she'd only just had a child. For her to be up and out of her child-bed so soon must be strange to them indeed.

Perhaps, then, it was good that she was here, that they see her, that they have some inkling of what she was sacrificing to face the Blight beside them. These precious early days with her babe in her arms, she could never get back. But if the men she was to help lead knew and understood that not even she was above making sacrifices, then perhaps there was more value to this than she had originally imagined.

She only wished it didn't ache so.

The truth was, she was of limited utility planning the journey to Denerim. She and her company would merely be additions to Arl Eamon's entourage, and the arl had the logistics well in-hand. No, what she needed to do was get back in fighting form. She'd been out of combat for months; their skirmish with bounty hunters on the way to Redcliffe had taken all her endurance, and that had been a relatively minor battle.

Even with her heightened Grey Warden stamina, it didn't take long before the effort of drawing back her bowstring began to tell on her. Still, she persisted, though sweat beaded on her brow and her arms ached with the strain. Not until she literally could not hold her draw long enough to take aim did she set the bow down, and allow herself to rest.

Immediately, there was a dipper of water at her elbow. She looked up to thank her benefactor, only to find herself staring into Alistair's concerned eyes. Behind him, Zevran stood casually by the stairs leading up to the castle, and Rìona knew the only thing that kept him from offering the same level of solicitude was appearances. Between now and the Landsmeet, they would have to be exceptionally careful to give no-one any indication of... well, anything. Not if Alistair's desire to wed her had any hope of succeeding.

Zevran, pragmatic as always, didn't seem to mind. But it troubled Rìona, that she would never be able to acknowledge him openly. Even Alistair was at greater liberty to show Zevran affection than she was.

Her mother had been right, all those months ago, when she direly predicted that Rìona wouldn't be happy with the need for discretion that being queen called for. How strange. She'd fought so hard to overcome and out-argue her mother's objections, back then, but the teyrna had been right. Now, Rìona would gladly give up the opportunity to be queen if it meant she could acknowledge her love for Zevran in the bold light of day.

What a hideous trick of fate, that now all their hopes rested upon exactly the thing she wished for least. Alistair must depose Loghain if they were to undo the accusation of treason against them, and Rìona must help him with that and give Ella the birthright she was due. It was a matter of duty. That they would all be happier in obscurity didn't factor into it.

"I thought you'd be on the boats today," she murmured to Alistair, slinging her bow onto her shoulder and falling into step beside him as they made their way to join Zevran.

"We decided we would be better off helping you today, _Guardiana_," Zevran answered, sheathing the dagger whose edge he'd been examining. "Come, let us see what you remember about stealth and evasion. We'll play a game of hide-and-seek around the castle. And then, when you have your wind back, we will see if you remember how to use your daggers."

If she hadn't understood how extraordinarily blessed she was to have the love of both these men before, Rìona knew it well that day. They made the ache of separation from Ella endurable. They gave her a reason to keep from dashing back into the castle and reclaiming the babe from Muirne, ignoring her duties for the sake of the instinct that pulled at her body like a lodestone. Not until her breasts began to ache abominably and leaking milk saturated her bindings did she finally yield to that imperative to return to her child, tearing frantically at the strips of cloth binding her and bringing the rooting babe to her breast.

She wept with relief and sorrow at the knowledge that she would need to do it all again the next day.

Alistair and Zevran came to her that night, as they had not done since she'd given birth. The bed was more than large enough to accommodate them all, and so Rìona slept with their reassuring presence on either side of her and Ella nestled snugly against her chest, where she might suckle with little movement or effort as Rìona slept. Sometime well before dawn she felt a kiss on her brow and, when she awoke at Muirne's tentative knock at her chamber door, they were both gone. 

* * *

The day before they were due to depart for Denerim, Rìona found herself alone in the practice yard, for the knights were all preparing for the journey, and Rìona had encouraged Alistair, and the rest of their people, to join the townsfolk in their labors that day to emphasize their common purpose. It was there that a servant found her, summoning her to Arl Eamon's study.

"Thank you for coming, Lady Cousland," Eamon greeted her politely, gesturing her to a chair. Rìona noted with amusement that he deliberately avoided looking at her in her Dalish armor. "First of all, I wish to apologize that we couldn't delay our departure for Denerim any longer. Having to skirt Lake Calenhad and take the North Road to avoid the Darkspawn encroachment to the south is going to add over a week to our journey, as it is. Any longer, and we would not arrive in time to meet face-to-face with our allies and make our case against Loghain before the Landsmeet."

"Please, my lord arl, do not apologize. We will do what we must."

"Are you certain you would not rather leave your babe here in Redcliffe?" the arl asked, frowning. "The journey to Denerim will not be an easy one, even in carriages. Isolde has decided to remain in Redcliffe, as she has recently discovered she is with child again herself. Your child would be well looked-after."

Leaving her child in the care of the unstable arlessa was the last thing Rìona wished to contemplate, but she smiled diplomatically and shook her head. "Thank you, Arl Eamon, but if matters in the Landsmeet play out according to plan, it is possible I may be in Denerim for many months to come. I will need to have the babe with me. If Alistair's plan succeeds, Ella will need to have a Naming in the Grand Cathedral as soon as possible to confirm her as Alistair's heir. She is still young enough that, with luck, she will be content enough to sleep nearly the entire way in a sling at the wet-nurse's breast. Hopefully that far north, we won't encounter any darkspawn, and if we do, Muirne has been instructed to stay sheltered within the carriage and avoid touching anything that's been in contact with darkspawn blood. It's the best we can do."

"Yes." Eamon grimaced, and Rìona braced herself. "About Alistair's plan. He's being rash, Lady Cousland. It will be much harder to make a case for his ascent to the throne with the complicating factors of you and your babe. You know this."

It was a struggle, to keep her voice level and not give vent to her annoyance. "It could, my lord. It could also ease the way, depending on the whim of the Landsmeet. We have no way of knowing for certain."

"Marriage amongst people of our rank is a practical and political alliance. It cannot be made for... sentimental reasons."

Rìona's eyes narrowed. "If you would seek to lecture me on that subject, perhaps first you'll indulge me with an explanation. Tell me, was it practicality that drove you to court the ire of your king in order to wed an Orlesian lass, when public sentiment was still so firmly against Orlais?" she asked tartly.

The arl drew himself up in rigid indignation. "My marriage did not affect the entire realm!"

"Perhaps not, but your hypocrisy is worthy of examination, nonetheless."

"We cannot let Alistair throw his chance at the throne away, when the safety of the realm is at stake!"

"Do you think you need to tell me that? Rest assured that any argument you make to me here now, I've made to him a dozen times since he decided upon this course!" Rìona snapped, losing her struggle to remain cool and unaffected. Maker! Since Ella's birth her temper had been on a fine thread, she knew, but she seemed utterly unable to moderate her response. "I am a Cousland, lest you've forgotten. I came to womanhood fully expecting to be wed where it would be most advantageous to my family. Sentiment never weighed into the equation."

"So then you seek to advance your name in all this?" The arl demanded sharply.

Rìona cursed herself for walking into that trap. "What would you have of me, Arl Eamon? If I say no, you accuse me of foolish and impractical sentiment. If I say yes, you accuse me of placing my own interests above those of the realm. It seems you've judged me wanting without ever giving me the benefit of a hearing. You had scarcely made my acquaintance before you were questioning my honor and integrity. So what is it you hope to accomplish with this harangue?"

"The lad won't be guided by me in this, and refuses to see reason. Remove yourself from consideration as his queen. Let the Landsmeet choose him on his own merits."

"Oh, my lord arl," Rìona laughed softly. "You have drastically misjudged 'the lad' if you believe that will dissuade him. Alistair is his own man. He's made his decision."

"He knows nothing of politics."

"He _knew_ nothing of politics, it's true. You and his father saw to it, by refusing to acknowledge him or give him the recognition he was due. You kept him in ignorance, and worse, you made him fear to be anything other than ignorant. You made him your stable boy, for the love of Andraste! It was a despicable neglect!"

"You presume to judge _me!_"

Maker, she needed to stop this! Certainly she was not aiding her cause any by convincing the arl she was irrational. But the words fell from her lips in a heedless torrent. "I cannot fathom your reasons, unless it was to neutralize anyone who might threaten your blood connection to the throne through Cailan, or to give you a handle with which to control Alistair should Cailan be lost. If that was your aim, I assure you, it was a futile one. He's made it his business to learn to lead. He will be no one's puppet. Not mine, and most assuredly not yours!"

"Your impertinence is out of line, Lady Cousland," the arl said coldly. "Think what you will; I cared for Alistair and attempted to protect him, as best I could. I have his best interests, and those of the realm, at heart."

"Interests that just so conveniently happen to be defined by you. But now there is another heir to consider. Cailan's legacy. His only child. Who will meet their obligation to our fallen king and look after _her_ interests? For I assure you, ser, she will not be raised in a barn!"

Strange, Rìona thought, how far she had come in a matter of weeks. In Orzammar, she had been willing to let Ella bear the label of bastard if it improved Alistair's chances to supplant Loghain. But now everything was different. She had a duty to her daughter.

"I see this is a fruitless conversation," the arl said, sighing. "I had hoped you would see reason."

"You've yet to present me with anything resembling reason, my lord arl. Make a valid argument for how Alistair's chances to take the throne and bring down Loghain will be improved significantly, and I promise you I will consider it. The truth is, Cailan _was_ Ella's father. The truth is, he intended to wed me. Any claim otherwise is false. So please, present me with a case that doesn't boil down to sacrificing the truth to make lies seem less valid."

"You will confirm Loghain's assertions that the Grey Wardens wish to control Ferelden." Eamon stated bluntly. "Alistair's illegitimacy already casts question upon his suitability to rule. We have only my word and his resemblance to Cailan and Maric to support our claim that he is Maric's son. To compound that with—forgive me, but I must speak the truth—a potentially scandalous choice of queen will only make matters worse."

"I know," Rìona felt her anger begin to abate, and bowed her head. "I swear to you, Arl Eamon, I've made those very points to him a number of times. If you believe he's made this choice ignorant of the potential consequences, I assure you, you're wrong. If it were only sentiment, I would refuse to be party to it. But it's not. You assume I wish to be queen—and mayhap one time I did, but not anymore. If not for my obligation to provide my babe with the recognition she is due, I would happily retire from politics altogether. But Alistair has some valid arguments to make. There _are_ advantages to his scheme. Whatever scandal might be attached to my name by Howe's slander, the Cousland lineage carries with it an undeniable ages-long legacy of solid leadership, integrity and loyalty to the realm. My father had popular support for the throne, when Cailan ascended. If we prevail, and expose Howe's claims for falsehoods, Alistair could do far worse in his choice for a bride, than the daughter of the man many thought should have been king, a man who was so loyal he refused what so many urged him to do, and instead swore his fealty to the Theirin line."

"Perhaps you're right," the arl acknowledged. "Only think how much stronger his claim would be, with another bride to whose name there is no doubt attached? If you're being as rational as you claim, surely you can see..."

"I do. And I've said as much to him. But what then, of Cailan's babe?"

To that, Eamon had no response. They both knew, even if Rìona were willing to let it happen, Alistair would not permit his brother's child to live in ignominy.

"Alistair has given his word that he will not allow his insistence upon having me as his bride prevent him from bringing Loghain down. And, if he falters in that resolve, I assure you, ser, I will not. Beyond that, we have an obligation to respect his will. And it is _his_ will, not mine."

"I will only be able to support him in this so far, Lady Cousland," the arl said with a heavy sigh. "I must look to the good of the realm. But, I will try as best I can to see it done. I promise no more."

"Then that shall have to do, my lord arl," Rìona said. With a gesture, he excused her from his study, and with a bow, she went.


	52. Chapter Fifty Two: Schemes

It was Alistair who opened the door of Rìona's bedchamber, when Zevran knocked for the benefit of any nearby servant who might question his simply strolling in. It wasn't nighttime, after all, when he might slip in unnoticed. He knew quite well how much depended upon discretion right now. He must act as though this were a purposeful conference with the Grey Wardens, rather than anything more intimate.

Rìona was pacing furiously before the hearth, while Alistair took up position leaning against the mantle with his arms crossed over his chest. In a nearby chair, the wet-nurse suckled little Ella, for all that Rìona still attended that task whenever she could. Clearly, right now, she was too distraught to be of any comfort to the babe.

"Muirne," Alistair said calmly, "perhaps you might take Ella to Mistress Wynne and Mistress Leliana's chambers while we confer, at least until Lady Cousland is less agitated?"

Zevran's eyebrows lifted in silent approval. Did Alistair realize, he wondered, just how much more easily he was using that tone of polite command, these days? He was beginning to speak like a nobleman, like a king, rather than a peasant boy born on the wrong side of the blanket.

Murmuring an assent, the wet-nurse detached the babe from her breast and laced her bodice, carrying Ella from the room.

"I'm going to rip that vile bastard's heart out with my bare hands!" Rìona snarled once the chamber door had closed. "The nerve of him, coming here and declaring himself Teyrn of Highever! I shall see him to the Void before I ever allow him to profit from such a claim!"

"All right," Alistair said slowly, "I'm behind this plan so far. But—keeping in mind there's still a lot about politics that I don't know—I'm reasonably certain threatening him in front of witnesses wasn't the best idea. At least, Arl Eamon didn't think so."

"Your arl has the moral certitude of a pox-ridden rat!"

Alistair spread his hands in a placating, 'I'm-harmless' gesture. "Just hazarding a guess, but maybe insulting our host, and strongest ally,in his own home isn't a great plan, either."

Rìona drew herself up, sucking in a deep breath to turn her rage upon Alistair, and then caught herself. With a visible effort, she subsided, hanging her head as the tension drained from her rigid body. "You're right. You're right! Maker! I'm behaving like a madwomen. Since Ella's birth—" She sighed, shaking her head. "Wynne says it's common, and that it will likely pass in a few more weeks, but I'm not going to do us any good as a political asset in this state."

"Tell me what it is you need, _mi Guardiana._" Zevran did not dare call her by any more tender endearment by the light of day. Not until matters were settled with their Landsmeet. "You have said I am not to kill this man, Howe, that it is a task for your hands alone. Then we must move against him, yes?"

"Yes, but we must have _cause,_" she said with an edge of frustration to her tone. "Otherwise it looks like premeditated murder. I could call him out in a duel on the floor of the Landsmeet chamber, after I bring my grievances before them, but frankly that's a great deal to leave to chance. He's a veteran of the Orlesian occupation and my father said he was a capable enough fighter, and my skills with my daggers are, as ever, sadly lacking. And frankly, I don't want him spreading his poison about my family to the nobles arriving in Denerim between now and the Landsmeet. We need a justification for confronting him outside the Landsmeet."

Restlessly, she began to pace again. Thankfully, however, she was deep in thought, rather than raging as she had been before. "We need to visit the contacts we made here in Denerim the last time. Sergeant Kylon, Master Ignacio, Slim Couldry. We need to find out what Howe has been up to, seek out some excuse for cornering him in his lair."

"Then that's what we'll do," Alistair said with a decisive nod. "Arl Eamon has told us we should sniff around Denerim and try to figure out what Loghain has been scheming, to get something more we can use against him in the Landsmeet. Shouldn't be that hard to get word on Howe's activities as well, right?"

"No, it shouldn't. All right, that's what we'll do. Zevran, please fetch Wynne. And Leliana, also. We'll put her skills as a spy to work for us."

There was a change that came over Rìona, when she donned her armor. Not the Dalish set; the arl's gruff hemming and hawing about needing to find her more appropriate armor—and Rìona's mounting defiance in the face of his prudery—had finally convinced Alistair to take action and play the mediator.

The problem was, there had been no armor in the arl's armory that fit Rìona, and the set she had worn before acquiring her Dalish armor had been consigned to Bodhan Feddic as they left the Brecilian Forest. It had been Leliana's suggestion that they question the old village leatherworker to see if he'd sold the set of armor Rìona had traded him when they first came to Redcliffe because it had been too easily recognized. As it turned out, he had not for, though the arl's forces were badly in need of armor, there were none of Rìona's stature and size. And so Alistair purchased the armor back from the leatherworker, using the arl's coin and mischievously paying the old man a few sovereigns more than strictly necessary.

Zevran had never seen Rìona in this armor, which had been made for her, commissioned by her father. She looked every inch the noblewoman in it, and she carried herself as such. Tears had flashed in her eyes, the first time she gingerly ran her fingers over the laurel-wreath crest on the pauldrons. She'd been so ashamed and distressed at her disgrace, these past months but, wearing the armor, she remembered her proud lineage and bore herself accordingly.

She wasn't the only one. Grimly accepting his role as contender for the throne, Alistair had set aside the armor he'd acquired at Soldier's Peak with the Warden-Commander's crest emblazoned on the chest, and begun to wear the armor which had once belonged to his brother. He carried his father's sword and wore on his back the shield bearing the device of his own bloodline. While Rìona seemed to come into herself, wearing the crest of her house, Alistair was still distinctly uncomfortable doing the same. And yet he did so dutifully, and in the process shouldered a burden he'd never wanted to bear.

The change in Rìona's demeanor was reflected in their companions' behavior as well, as they remembered that it was Rìona who had led them through so many of their endeavors. Alistair was still nominally in command, and he did not defer to her as he once had. Rather, they began to act as partners, sharing the burden between them.

They made a regal pair, Zevran thought, taking pride in beholding them. And naturally, there were political benefits to the fact that they looked the part.

Thus arrayed, Rìona held her head high as they left Arl Eamon's Denerim estate. Anonymity was no longer a concern; all of Ferelden knew who they were and why they had come. They would make no attempt to hide it.

They sent Leliana off to survey the haunts of the nobility; the Gnawed Noble tavern, among others. There, she was to blend in and listen quietly to the concerns of the nobles pouring into Denerim for the Landsmeet. It would provide Rìona with insight into their particular grievances against Loghain, which she could then play upon to win their support.

After sending the bard on her way, they ventured into the city.

The refugee situation had gotten far worse, since they had last been to Denerim.

"Loghain has had to open the ports, to let in the ships that will carry away the few refugees with coin to pay for passage," Rìona remarked, as they surveyed the bustling docks, packed with desperate people bearing all their possessions in ragged sacks on their backs. "Not only Denerim, but Amaranthine and Gwaren as well. Rumor has it he won't open Highever port, though, as he considers it too great a security risk, being closest to Orlais."

For every refugee with coin to seek their fortune in other lands, there were fifty more who would never be so fortunate. The refugee camp outside the city gates was sprawling and squalid on a scale that could scarcely be believed. It made the back alleys of Antiva City look like the gardens of palatial villas. There was now more than one funeral pyre that burned night and day outside the city walls; it was the only way to address the sanitation issue, as people continued to starve to death even after the scant harvest. Disease was rampant, and anyone suspected of carrying the Blight sickness—however untrue the supposition might be—was summarily killed and burned by his own neighbors.

Even in Antiva, where life was corrupt and vicious, things were not like this. The filth and desperation were appalling, and he saw that knowledge reflected on Rìona and Alistair's faces. This was not the homeland they knew.

Once, Zevran might have enjoyed the chaos, the exhilarating sense of impending destruction hurtling toward them all. He would have laughed in its face and invited it to dance, to claim him as well, if it dared.

Now, he was most concerned that such sickness and pandemonium and refuse lay only a mile or so away from the manor house in which his daughter resided, consuming resources that might better be used to keep her safe. Ferelden would be much better off if more of these wretches died, rather than less.

Wisely, he refrained from mentioning either sentiment. No doubt his Wardens would feel dutifully obligated to point out the plight and suffering of all these thousands of pathetic souls. But Zevran knew also, deep down, they shared his selfish concern, and despised themselves a little for it.

"Warden," Sergeant Kylon greeted her with a courteous bow. "It's been months since anyone has heard any news about you. Some rumors had you for dead."

"No, Sergeant, not dead," Rìona said with a small smile. "We've been in Orzammar, putting together an army to defeat the darkspawn. Tell me, what's been happening in Denerim?"

Matters, it seemed, had gotten worse on that front as well. Arl Howe's elite, hand-picked guard were the scourge of the city, making no effort to keep order while adding to the chaos. Rumor had it, the Arl of Denerim was using them to quell political dissent. No one could confirm such claims, of course, but gossip had Howe's men spiriting away anyone who attempted to speak out against the regent's rule to be imprisoned and tortured in Fort Drakon, or in the dungeons of the arl's estate.

"He's keeping prisoners in his estate?" Rìona asked sharply, but Kylon shrugged.

"It's just rumor. No one can confirm it," the sergeant answered. "If he has, there haven't been any survivors or escapees to tell the tale, and the servants at the estate are terrified to talk about what they've seen. When they're not causing disorder in the streets, apparently they spend their time whoring. Sanga refused to let her workers serve any more of the Howe's men, at least until they stormed the Pearl and ransacked the place. Now she serves them because she has no other choice if she wants to keep the brothel open. Word is, not a night passes when they don't take new 'entertainment' to their barracks, and not every whore who goes in comes back out, save on her way to the pyres. Some of those girls they take are only whoring themselves because they're stranded here in Denerim, refugees whose families have died, trying to earn enough coin to take a ship to the Free Marches."

"Maker's breath!" Alistair groaned. "Has this entire city gone mad?"

"That it has, ser," Kylon said with a grim nod. "The nobles don't see, or don't care to see. Most of them won't step foot outside their estates, for fear the Blight sickness might come to Denerim. If they see chaos outside their windows, they assume it's the refugees stirring up trouble. Sometimes it even is. A lot of desperate people here willing to slide a knife between someone's ribs for their next meal. Keeping order's like trying to hold back the tide. Right now it's all I can do to convince these half-wits working for me that I mean what I say when I insist they aren't to follow the example of Howe's guards."

The sergeant stared at Rìona, the blunt-spoken wit which had so charmed her on her first visit to Denerim nowhere in evidence. "Whatever you're going to do to stop this madness, Warden, for the love of the Maker, do it soon."

"Is this enough to go on?" Alistair asked, when they had left the sergeant.

Rìona shook her head. "Not if it's merely rumor. We need some sort of confirmation. Come, let's see what Slim Couldry has been up to."

The thief and agitator turned out to be singularly useless, save for sharing the news that Loghain had commissioned a crown to be made for himself, which he intended to wear at the Landsmeet.

"A bold move," Rìona snorted after Couldry was gone. "Crowning himself before the Landsmeet. So much for the claim he made to Arl Eamon, that Anora rules and he merely leads her armies. He's after more than symbolic power. No monarch has ever sat upon the throne of Ferelden save by consent of the Landsmeet; it would overturn ages of tradition. I'm half tempted to do as Couldry asks and steal the thing, if for no other reason than to puncture his vanity. It's a pity we don't have time to get involved with petty theft."

It was from their unlikely ally, Master Ignacio, that they got confirmation that Howe was indeed taking political hostages. A small boy, the son of a minor bann, had been kidnapped, ostensibly for a ransom which would fatten Howe's starving coffers. Assisting in his rescue was a contract Rìona was only too happy to accept, but it turned out to be more complicated, as Howe's people didn't produce the boy. Howe intended to keep him until after the Landsmeet, to ensure his father's vote pleased the regent. Fortunately, Ignacio knew of this plan, as well, and his people conducted a raid to rescue to the boy, while Rìona and Alistair and their people created a distraction with the false ransom drop.

"What _aren't_ you telling me?" Rìona demanded of Ignacio, when he explained the diversion and its results.

"It is not in the Crows' interest that the archdemon wins," Ignacio replied smoothly. "Therefore, I will say nothing more, save only that the Arl of Denerim is not your only enemy." Ignacio's eyes glinted coldly. "Beware you do not become so focused on one, that you lose sight of the others."

Ignacio left them with that cryptic warning, and they were left to attempt to puzzle out his meaning. Leliana's intelligence provided no assistance in the matter. Many nobles were uneasy with Loghain's regency, but the threat of the Blight had them willing to throw their support to whomever seemed most well-positioned to defeat the darkspawn. Few were actually against the Grey Wardens, however, and none to the extent that they might be this enemy whose threat Ignacio had intimated.

When they returned to Arl Eamon's estate, Rìona was fretting and looked restless and unsatisfied. Zevran had seen her like this before, many times. This was how she had been on their first trip to Denerim, when he'd begun using pleasure to distract her from her troubles for a time. He wished he could do so now, but neither he nor Alistair had shared her bed since they had left Redcliffe, and they had not made love to her since before the birth of the babe. In Redcliffe, she had not been healed from the birth enough for pleasure, and then, once they left for Denerim, it had become a matter of discretion. There were too few rooms in the arl's estate; doubling up was required. Rìona shared her room with the wet-nurse who helped her care for the babe, and Leliana and Wynne shared another. Even he and Alistair did not share pleasure, now, for Sten—too large for any bed within the manor house—slept on a bedroll on the floor of the chamber Zevran and Alistair shared.

There was no privacy to be had, and Zevran found himself thinking wistfully of the leased house to which he and Rìona had retreated on their last visit to Denerim, when in search of privacy. But even that would be a risk, now. She was no longer anonymous, and they did not know who might be watching their activities. It was still weeks until the Landsmeet and, until then, they all had to be careful to conduct themselves with the utmost propriety.

It was frustrating, and infuriating. In a secret gesture of contemptuous defiance, Zevran waited until Sten was snoring on the far end of their bedchamber that night, before slipping under the bedclothes and waking Alistair by taking him into his mouth. Alistair awoke with a gasp and quickly stuffed a pillow over his own face to silence his moans, as his flesh swelled and hardened against Zevran's tongue.

Alistair whispered a curse when Zevran emerged from under the bedclothes sometime later, licking his lips. Pleased with himself, Zevran rolled over and listened to Alistair's breathing resume a more sedate pace. He smirked when Alistair pressed close to his back, lips seeking out the point of his ear as large, questing fingers wrapped around his shaft. Then it was Zevran's turn to bite the pillow.

It was good to have release, but the furtive caresses weren't what he wanted. He wanted to pleasure and enjoy his Wardens properly, and give them ease from their burdens, and he had to remind himself again that it was necessary to bide his time, until their position was secure. Waiting was not a game he enjoyed playing.

The next morning, Alistair and Rìona were summoned into a conference in the arl's study and emerged grim and tense. Rìona's eyes blazed with a determination Zevran had not seen in many months, while Alistair's face was drawn into concerned lines and worry etched his brow. He gestured for Zevran and Leliana to follow them and they made their way to the library and closed the doors, after assuring no else was within.

"We have to go!" Rìona said without preamble.

"Under other circumstances, I would agree," Alistair argued. "But considering what Master Ignacio told us just yesterday about having other enemies, and not fixating on just one, I can't help but think it's a little too convenient that this information should be offered up to us so freely right now."

Leliana beat Zevran to the obvious question. "What information would that be?"

While Rìona paced, Alistair explained. "We just met with a woman who claims to be Queen Anora's maid in the arl's study. She says Anora wants to work with us, that the queen feels the situation with Howe and Loghain has gotten out of control. As a gesture of 'good faith' she's sending word that Howe's men are bragging they have a prisoner from Highever in the dungeons of Howe's estate. From the description, Anora is convinced it might be Lord—_Teyrn_—Fergus."

"Your brother?" Zevran asked, glancing at Rìona sharply. She looked back over her shoulder slightly, crossing her arms tightly over her chest as though hugging herself, and nodded.

"Maker preserve us!" Leliana breathed. "Is the information reliable?"

"That seems to be the question," Alistair answered unhappily, as Zevran stepped behind Rìona and, despite Leliana's presence, laid a hand upon her shoulder. She stiffened for a moment, before leaning against him.

Leliana said nothing, even when Alistair stepped close and embraced Rìona from the other side.

"It is a trap, _Guardiana._" Zevran kissed the crown of her head once before pulling away, lest a heedless servant ignore the closed doors and walk in on them. "You know it must be."

"I don't have any choice." Rìona wiped her eyes, pushing Alistair away when he attempted to draw her closer. "If it is a trap, she's used the only bait I cannot possibly refuse. If there's a chance Fergus might be alive, I have to take it."

"If it's a _reasonable_ chance, then sure. But really, how likely is it that he's alive?" Alistair demanded, and Rìona drew herself up as though stung. "He was scouting in the Korcari Wilds, surrounded by a horde of darkspawn. The chances that he made it out are—"

"Slightly higher than the chance that you and I might be plucked off the top of the Tower of Ishal by an ages-old abomination and carried to safety, I'd say," Rìona snapped. "Do we _really_ want to quibble about long odds?"

"All right, that's a fair point," Alistair acknowledged. "But why would Anora offer this information to us? Erlina may have claimed ignorance, but we know Anora has Cailan's letter. She knows you were meant to supplant her. Why would she want to help you, or believe that you'd be willing to work with her?"

"Do we know she has Cailan's letter?" Rìona asked. "For all we know, Gainley's ambassadorial courier met with darkspawn or bandits en route to Denerim. Or perhaps we've finally discovered the one rational person in Denerim who is actually willing to put the Blight ahead of politics and power struggles."

"_Guardiana..._" Zevran chided softly, and Rìona hung her head.

"I know. I know! I'm sorry. I admit, it's unlikely, at best, that Anora is as sincere as her offer of alliance sounds. But whether she has Cailan's letter or not, whether the information about my brother is valid or not, _I have no choice._ If there's any chance, no matter how slim, that my brother is alive, I must go and try to free him. After all, what if Howe intends to use Fergus as a hostage against me?"

"Oh, Maker..." Alistair groaned, and Zevran found himself nodding unwillingly.

"We know Howe is taking political hostages to sway the votes of the Landsmeet. What if he threatens to kill Fergus if we don't drop our opposition to Loghain? What shall I do then? Can you possibly conceive of a worse scenario? Shall I condemn my own brother to death? _Again?_"

Alistair lifted his head. "Again?"

Rìona laughed bitterly. "Oh? Did I never tell you what Duncan had me do? How he neglected to tell me that withdrawing the army from Ostagar would mean abandoning Fergus in the Korcari Wilds until _after_ Cailan had already issued the order?"

"No. You never told me that." Alistair looked stricken.

She began fiddling absently with the binding of a tome on one of the shelves of the library, her voice soft and filled with sorrow. "I begged him to find a way to stop the withdrawal until Fergus could be located, and he refused. Would _you_ put me in the same position, Alistair?"

"Of course not!"

"We knew we'd need to confront Howe one way or the other. We've been looking for a reason to do just that. This is it. This is our reason. Ultimately, it doesn't even matter whether Fergus is actually there or not. This is the excuse we were seeking, to end Howe."

"Perhaps you're right," Alistair conceded. "But what about Ella? Will you put yourself in harm's way—either to rescue Fergus or to fulfill your vendetta against Howe—and leave her an orphan?"

"I have no choice," Rìona said again, softly. "Whether it's Howe or the darkspawn or the archdemon himself, I must leave my babe to fight. And a part of me withers every time I think about it, but what sort of lesson will I be able to teach her about duty, if I fail to do my own?"

"I still don't like it," Leliana fretted. "At least give me an opportunity to scout the estate—a day or two, perhaps—and see if I can get any better information."

"You will scout the estate," Rìona said, drawing herself up in that way she had, that said she was once again shouldering the mantle of command. "One day. I want to know the comings and goings of Howe's guards. The rest of us are going to the Pearl. Howe's men consider it their personal property these days. We're going to 'acquire' some of their armor while they're otherwise engaged. One day, no more. The longer we wait, the longer Howe has to make demands of me in exchange for Fergus' safety."

Sighing, she faced them, her jaw thrusting stubbornly forward. "Tomorrow we make our move."


	53. Chapter Fifty Three: Duty

"You're planning to go in unarmed? Are you _mad?_"

"You and Leliana will be armed," Rìona said calmly. "We were fortunate to find armor that will fit Leliana well enough. As for me and Zevran... I see no other choice but for us to pose as whores that the two of you are bringing back to the barracks."

"_I_ shall not be unarmed," Zevran assured Alistair, withdrawing a stiletto from someplace upon his person, and tucking it away again. Rìona had no doubt there were many more weapons than that one blade secreted upon his person.

"But Rìona will."

"We'll find a bow for me once we gain access to the estate. Leliana, I want you to carry the Cousland sword until I have need of it. Will you do that for me?"

"Of course." Leliana accepted the blade, the hilt and scabbard of which had been wrapped in rags to disguise their distinctive laurel-wreath crest.

"You're still going to be _unarmored,_" Alistair pointed out. "Both of you."

Rìona shook her head. "It can't be helped. I'll try to find a chainmail shirt once we're inside, but we can't go in armor if we're to be masquerading as whores, and I can't think of any way to bring our armor along, or stash it beforehand, that doesn't expose us to unnecessary risk of discovery."

Alistair turned away in disgust, and she felt a pang, that this was troubling him so. "This is insanity."

"It's my _brother,_ Alistair," Rìona murmured, reaching up to touch his shoulder. "What would you have me do?"

He stood there stiffly for a long moment, not responding to her touch, until finally he sighed and turned to look at her. "Nothing. Fine. If we're going to do this, let's go." 

* * *

They waited until nearly evening to make their move, for that was when many of the guards who were off-duty would be returning to the barracks with whores in tow. With the increase in comings and goings, it would be easier to blend in. Howe's guards were getting more and more lax in their duty, as their pay kept coming late. It helped, also, that there was a mob of angry merchants and craftsmen at the gates of Howe's estate, demanding payment for services they had rendered in good faith. Bitterly, Rìona wondered what had happened to all the wealth Howe had pilfered from Highever's coffers, if he was unable to pay his guards and merchants in a timely manner.

"At least some of it, we stole back," Zevran chuckled when she ventured to speak the question aloud, and Rìona laughed softly, remembering their last visit to Denerim.

"A little less giggling, please," Alistair said tightly as they approached the guard-station at the gates.

"Try to look more lecherous," Rìona hissed, affecting a slatternly saunter and shrugging her thin shawl down her shoulders to reveal a low-cut bodice that did little to conceal her swollen, milk-full breasts. In response, Alistair's hand swung down with a loud smack, drawing a startled yelp from her as he somehow managed to both slap and grope her backside in a single move. Alistair gave a grimace that could only charitably have been construed as a lewd smirk, but it didn't matter. The guard's attention was on Rìona as she scowled at Alistair and rubbed her stinging posterior. He waved them through the gate with a leer of his own.

"_That_ lecherous enough for you?" Alistair asked once they were past the guard.

"It certainly was for me," Zevran said with a lascivious grin. "I wouldn't mind seeing more of that in a more private setting."

"Perhaps we should first concentrate on getting out of here alive?" Leliana suggested sweetly, a hint of humor coloring her voice as it echoed behind her helm.

"Agreed," Alistair replied. "Maker's breath, cover yourself! Half the city is gawking at you right now. And just when did you get so... _plentiful_... anyway?"

"After the babe was born," Rìona snickered and pulled her shawl up again, giving him an affectionate smile. As delightfully shameless as he could be privately, it was charming to see that not all his innate modesty had disappeared, and that much of his possessiveness still lingered. "Oh, Alistair, I do adore you."

He blushed and ducked his head, smiling at her. "I should hope so. Now let's find you some armor and a bow before I lose my mind with worry."

"I suppose this begs the question of whether we intend to try to sneak into the dungeons without confrontation, or if we are going to fight our way in," Leliana pointed out as they worked their way through the manor, seeking an armory of some sort.

"Fight our way in," Rìona declared. "If Fergus is down there, we have no idea what condition he's in, and we couldn't bring Wynne along because there was no way to disguise her. We'll remove any potential resistance first, so that once we have him, we can get back to Eamon's estate without endangering him further."

No sooner had she spoken, than Alistair opened a door to a large chamber lined with bunks, trunks and armor racks. Four half-armored guards sat around a table, dicing. Two were dead before they even noticed aught was amiss. The other two scrambled off the benches beside the table, but barely had laid hands to their swords before they fell, also.

The chainmail shirt Rìona found on one of the armor racks was too tight across her unfettered bosom and too loose everywhere else, falling past her hips until they belted it snugly about her waist. Leliana and Zevran had to rip strips from one of the dead men's bloody shirts to bind the chainmail sleeves tight to her arms so that they wouldn't impede her draw. But once she had donned it and armed herself with a bow that had been propped by the door, Alistair relaxed visibly, and even more so when Zevran strapped on a hardened leather cuirass.

"Better." He nodded once, brusquely, and led them out of the barracks toward the dining hall, where many of the guard were feasting and gambling.

Perhaps she should have felt guilty, slaughtering men at their leisure, but Rìona found her conscience troubled her not at all. She remembered Oren and Oriana, murdered as they lay sleeping in their beds, and wondered if any of these men had taken part in the sneak attack on Highever. Nearly a year, now, retribution had awaited its day, and that day had finally arrived. Her head was clear and her heart cold as she calmly nocked one arrow after another, sending men to the rush-covered floor with their last breaths gurgled out around the arrow shaft protruding from their throats.

It wasn't even about Fergus, anymore, Rìona realized, troubled by the fact that she _wasn't_ troubled. She wasn't certain she actually believed he was being held here. No. This was about duty. This was about the vow she had made to her parents, to see Howe pay for his crime. After today, for better or worse, it would be done, and that horrible sense of _waiting_ would be gone.

Each dead body was one less man standing between her and Howe.

The massive iron portal that seemed to lead down to the dungeon was locked, and none of the guards they had killed appeared to carry a key. Thus they were forced to make their way room by room through the manor house, as more guards arrived in waves from the grounds and barracks, drawn by the furor. Those men fell, also.

It was in what was clearly the lord's bedchamber that they found another entrance to the dungeons.

"Wait!" Leliana called, kneeling beside a chest. "If you want a look into Howe and Loghain's schemes, this may be a good place to begin."

Within were a number of ledgers, records of payments made to bands of mercenaries and to purchase the paraphernalia of supporting an army. That, Rìona thought, was where Highever's wealth had gone, and considerable other funds as well. They detailed expenditures for salaries for Howe's guards, armor and weapons, foodstuffs, tents and blankets, and much more.

"Maker! Where has the funding for all this come from? The royal treasury must be tapped dry by now!"

Alistair peered over her shoulder. "_Income_ from the Alienage?" He pointed to a recurring figure in the credit column. "How does _that_ work?"

"The Alienage has been closed off for months now, by Howe's orders. Some sort of riot at first and now a contagion, the city guard says. But even if it weren't, certainly it boasts no industry which could yield this sort of profit." Rìona frowned. "This makes no sense. Could it be coin from somewhere else that he's embezzling? Or perhaps the proceeds from his blackmail and ransom plots?"

At the bottom of the chest lay another sheath of documents, these stamped with the seal of the griffon.

"That's the Grey Warden emblem," Alistair remarked. "Let me see those. Hm. They're in some sort of cipher. Duncan was just beginning to teach me to read some of the Grey Warden codes when he was killed. Not enough to translate these, though."

"It also begs the question of what Howe is doing with Grey Warden documents," Rìona added. "Did these come from the Warden compound, do you think?"

"Perhaps." Alistair didn't sound convinced. "But why only these few encoded documents? Do they have some special significance? This looks like the sort of sheath a courier might carry. It's not even a portion of the records that were kept in Duncan's study."

"These are all excellent questions, but there will be time to puzzle over them later," Zevran suggested. "For now, we must move on, before more guards arrive."

"Good point." Rìona handed the ledger referencing the Alienage and the Grey Warden documents to Leliana. "Put these in your pack. I want a closer look at that ledger later."

As they started down the stairs into the dungeons, Alistair muttered softly, "Just why would someone have a door to the dungeons in their bedchamber?"

Zevran chuckled wickedly. "I can think of a number of reasons. Some of them quite pleasant, in fact."

Alistair blushed.

Rìona swallowed hard at what appeared to be a splatter of old blood on one of the damp stone walls. "Something tells me _pleasure_ has little to do with what transpires in these dungeons, save, perhaps, the arl's own."

"That's... a disturbing thought," Alistair replied with a shudder.

Feeling slightly nauseated that her brother might be in this place, Rìona nodded bleakly. "Come. Let's find Fergus, if he's here, and get out."

The first prisoner they freed was not her brother, but a fellow Grey Warden who spoke with a lightly Orlesian-flavored accent.

"I know you," Alistair said, frowning thoughtfully. "You were at my Joining. You were visiting from Jader. Riordan, right?"

"Alistair. It's good to see you, brother. And... sister?" he turned a questioning glance to Rìona.

"Pleased to meet you, ser. I'm Rìona. I took my Joining just before the battle at Ostagar. Aside from Alistair and Duncan, you're the first Grey Warden I've really had a chance to meet."

"Duncan?" The Warden's voice brightened. "Is he here with you?"

"I'm sorry," Alistair replied sadly. "He fell at Ostagar with the rest of our brethren."

Riordan bowed his head, shaking it sorrowfully. "Then it is true? All the Wardens were lost?"

"All save Alistair and myself. How came you to be in Ferelden, much less in Arl Howe's dungeons?"

"That is a story that can wait for another time," he said. "I suggest we get out of here."

"We can't. My brother may be down here."

"Brother?" She didn't understand Riordan's frown. "You are not here on Grey Warden business?"

"No. This is a private matter. Even if he's not, I have business with Arl Howe." Rìona gave the Warden a scrutinizing look. He was pale and appeared half-starved, yet he'd dispatched a guard quite efficiently. "Are you well enough to fight, or at least make it out on your own?"

"I can make it out. I would highly recommend you come with me, though. After what I have experienced in these dungeons, I have no objection to seeing this Arl Howe dead. However, the middle of a Blight is no time for 'personal business.'"

"It is when Arl Howe is one of the obstacles standing between us and the support we need to actually end this Blight," Rìona answered tersely. "If you're not going to aid us, I suggest you make your way out before the guards regroup. We're staying with Arl Eamon of Redcliffe at his estate. Seek refuge there, if you have nowhere else to stay, and we'll convene with you later to discuss what brings an Orlesian Warden to Denerim."

With a distant and courteous bow, the Warden walked away, sliding deftly into the shadows when he was nearly out of their sight.

The stench of the dungeons was enough to make Rìona retch, despite the fact that she was no longer pregnant. Rotten blood and offal besmeared the stone floors. Corpses that hadn't yet been carried to the pyres hung from shackles and lay stretched upon racks, their limbs grotesquely disjointed.

Her face ashen, Leliana approached an empty rack. "It was here that Tug was killed," she murmured mournfully. "Sketch and I found him, after Marjolaine betrayed us."

"Here?" Shocked, Rìona stared at her. "You never mentioned that, when Marjorlaine betrayed you to a guard, he kept you in these dungeons."

"At first I didn't know that Arl Howe had taken over the estate of the former Arl of Denerim, where I had been imprisoned. I'd assumed he had his own estate. And then, once we were here..."

"Do you need to leave?"

Leliana shook her head, setting her jaw. "No. I freed the prisoners from this dungeon once. I'll do it again. I wouldn't leave your brother here to suffer what I suffered in this place. I just... it's been so many years, but nothing here has changed."

"That's... actually rather odd, now that you mention it," Rìona remarked. "I didn't know Arl Urien, but none of what my parents told me indicated he was the sort of man to countenance... this. He was said to be a very stern, ascetic man, and the biggest conflict of his tenure as the Arl of Denerim was that he neglected the Alienage, and imposed harsh penalties upon elves who broke the law, harsher than those visited upon humans for the same sorts of crimes. Some say he was a hard father to his son, Lord Vaughan. Others say he wasn't hard enough and that Vaughan was a lech and a wastrel who deserved what he got. But none of what my parents told me mentioned anything of this sort."

"It wasn't Arl Urien who held me," Leliana replied. "It was a commander in his guard, Harwen Raleigh. He was trying to instigate a war between Ferelden and Orlais. I don't know if Arl Urien was aware of his activities."

"Raleigh?" Rìona frowned. "I've heard my father speak of him. He used to be a minor bann, who lost his lands to the Orlesians. My father supported King Maric when Maric refused to return Raleigh's lands to him, because the company of men he led were little more than thugs who conducted themselves like brutes upon their prisoners of war. Rape, torture, the dishonorable slaughter of troops who surrendered in good faith. He said Raleigh and Howe... Oh, Maker."

"What?" Alistair asked sharply.

"He said Raleigh and Howe were cut from the same cloth, that Howe supported Raleigh's bid in the Landsmeet to reclaim his lands when Maric denied him. Dishonorable conduct toward prisoners of war was really the source of my father's first falling-out with Howe. He said the war highlighted Howe's vicious side. He claimed some men were simply like that; they saw the chaos of warfare as an opportunity to inflict their sadistic impulses upon others. During the Occupation, father had to censure Howe for abusing—and allowing his troops to abuse—Orlesian prisoners. Howe claimed Raleigh's methods were perfectly justified, that Orlesian whores on Fereldan soil deserved what they got."

Rìona covered her eyes for a moment, trying to sort through the hours and hours of discussion she'd had with her parents about the state of Ferelden politics, about the leanings and allegiances of each bann and arl. "Was Raleigh a bann sworn to Amaranthine? Ah! I can't recall. Leliana... do you know who hired Marjolaine to bring those Orlesian documents to Ferelden?"

Leliana shook her head. "I had assumed it was Raleigh. Or that Marjolaine did it for her own amusement."

"You think it was this Howe?" Zevran inquired.

"I think somehow Loghain became convinced that Orlais was a more pressing threat than the Blight. I had assumed that the paranoia was all Loghain's, and that Howe was simply toadying to him and using it for his own profit. But what if it's more than that?"

"That's another interesting question," Alistair agreed. "But we need to move on."

"Of course," Rìona murmured, though her mind continued to spin. Raleigh and Howe, two noblemen who both fell into disfavor after the Occupation for similar causes. Howe had been disliked in the Landsmeet, for he was crude, his honor suspect, and his father had been a traitor. If Arl Eamon was to be believed, Howe had been attempting for years to smear her family with reports that Eleanor Cousland had been an Antivan whore. Such gossip would have backfired upon him, of course. Had he been more credible, perhaps it would have found purchase, but with such a reputation, it would have been dismissed as petty spite. With the Ferelden penchant for leaving private matters private, likely any attempt to spread such salacious rumors would have shamed Howe far more than her parents.

If Howe had been carrying his grudge against the Couslands since the Occupation, was it possible he'd decided to take a leaf from Raleigh's book and attempted to instigate a conflict that would discredit his rivals while justifying the very behaviors for which he had been shunned in the first place? Had Loghain's paranoia and isolationism given him the means to enact a decades-old vendetta?

The next prisoner they freed was the son of Bann Sighard, who claimed to have been imprisoned while in the process of tracking down his wet-nurses' son, who reported that Loghain quit the field _before_ Cailan fell.

"You're certain?" Alistair demanded. "Everyone's been saying Loghain withdrew his troops because he saw the battle was unwinnable, that he saved them from needless slaughter."

"Not according to my milk-brother," Oswyn said with an emphatic shake of his head. "He said the retreat sounded before King Cailan's troops were overwhelmed, that if Loghain had flanked the horde when the signal went up, it would have turned the tide."

"Do you have any idea where your friend is now?"

"No," Oswyn replied. "He disappeared, and when I tried to find him, I wound up here. Arl Howe tried to force me to confess to sedition, to spreading false rumors against the regent. I can only assume that my friend succumbed to similar torture."

The bann's son limped from the dungeons, and it was shortly thereafter that they finally encountered Howe, overseeing the torture of yet another prisoner.

"Bryce Cousland's little spitfire," he sneered. "I'd wondered when you'd show up."

"Where is my brother?"

Something flickered in Howe's eyes, before his mouth curved in a cruel smile. "Dead, of course. He died weeks ago, here in this very chamber as a matter of fact. Apparently the demands of entertaining my men were simply too much for him. A fitting end for a whore born of a whore, I think. And now here you are, the final Cousland whore come to share her mother and brother's fate. Oh, yes. Shall I tell you how your mother died? The strumpet your father bought for a few sovereigns all those years ago? Shall I tell you just what it was your father saw, in those final moments of his life, as she put her talents to use for me and my men in the hopes we might spare her?"

"You're lying," Rìona said coldly. "My mother may have been a whore, but even whores have their standards and you would never have been worthy of her. She may have serviced fat, sweaty merchants and flaccid drunkards, but she would have died a thousand deaths before letting a craven weasel like _you_ touch her."

Howe's mouth tightened, though he shrugged. "She kissed my feet like a properly broken mabari bitch and called me her lord, before the end. And you'll do the same. All these years, I've waited, while your family of Orlesian-loving traitors profited and claimed the glory and renown that should have been mine. With every lucrative trade deal bought between your mother's thighs, every vote in the Landsmeet, every time you Couslands held yourselves up as paragons of honor and respectability, I've awaited this day, when I would see the last of you dead. Born to a family of whores and pimps, and fighting for the cause of a dying and dishonored order, you're nothing. Your family's deaths raised me to the ear of a king, and soon you will join them."

Howe drew his sword as an arrow from Leliana's bow pierced the throat of one of the mages among his guard, and he rushed Rìona with no warning. His sword splintered her bow as she raised it to ward herself and caught her upper arm. Her left arm fell limply to her side, numbed to the point of uselessness, as Alistair thrust himself between her and Howe and Howe raised his sword for the killing blow. With a roar, he unleashed a bright burst of holy energy that sent Howe and his guards, and the one remaining mage, off their feet. Zevran appeared behind one of the guards, suddenly emerging from the shadows to nearly sever his head from his body as both daggers slid across his throat, and then he was in motion, spinning toward the remaining mage who was struggling to regain enough power to cast a spell after the force of Alistair's holy smite.

Tucking her injured arm close to her body, Rìona drew the dagger she'd strapped to her waist after arming herself and looked for an opening that never came. This was her moment of vengeance, and she was all but useless. Never before had she despised her lack of fighting prowess as she did in that moment, when she had to be helped to her feet and handed her family's sword to plunge it into Howe's still-heaving chest and stop his final, burbling breaths.

Only afterward did she realize she was sobbing, and not with pain. Truthfully, she could barely feel her arm, as Alistair and Zevran rushed to unbind the sleeve of her chainmail shirt and inspect the massive bruise slowly darkening there. The bone, at least, didn't appear to be broken.

Had Howe been telling the truth? Had Fergus died here? Or had he never been here at all?

"We must hurry," Zevran said tensely. "If this is a trap, it is not yet sprung, for there has been no ambush, and very little resistance."

Wiping at her face, Rìona nodded and sent Leliana with Howe's keys to release the rest of the prisoners, who included an elf from the Alienage and Lord Vaughan, the late Arl Urien's son.

"That's him!" the elf cried, grabbing Leliana's arm. "He's the one who kidnapped my wife and cousin and brought them here."

"Is this true?" Rìona demanded, gritting her teeth against the throbbing heat that was beginning to settle in her arm.

"How should I know?" Vaughan snapped. "You think I keep track of every knife-eared whore in the Alienage?"

Rìona shook her head with disgust. "Oh, for Andraste's sake! Zevran, kill him."

She walked away with the sound of Zevran's dagger driving into the man's chest and his last pained gasp in her ears.

"Are you all right?" Alistair asked in concern, falling into step at her shoulder.

"Zevran's right. There's been far too little resistance, so far. Either Anora wasn't playing us false when she sent us here, or the trap isn't what we think it to be," Rìona fretted as Leliana attempted to soothe a man who appeared to be in the throes of lyrium withdrawal. The only coherent speech he could manage was a request to take his ring to his sister, a signet which bore the crest of the Waking Sea Bannorn. Unable to take him with them, they saw to his comfort as best they could and swore to send rescue as soon as they were safe.

A heavy feeling of anxiety was upon all of them as they hurried from the dungeons to the front doors of the estate, only to find them blocked by twenty armed troops, led by Loghain's own lieutenant.

Loghain's men. Not Howe's.

"Wardens, I'm here to arrest you for treason, and for the murder of the Arl of Denerim and his men. Surrender peacefully, and your companions may go."

There were far too many of them, and Rìona was injured.

"Now we know what trap the queen laid. But why?" Alistair asked in an undertone.

"Not a trap. A diversion. She wanted us away from the arl's estate," Rìona said with mounting horror. "Zevran, go. Get to Ella, now!"

She loved him madly for dashing away without question as, bleakly, she and Alistair surrendered to the knight.

_Author's Note: I went with the "Leliana's Song" version of Leliana's backstory, not the one from Origins. It fit better._


	54. Chapter Fifty Four: Pawns

Judging from the amount of scrambling being done by the household staff, and by Arl Eamon's put-out expression as he greeted her in his main hall, she had interrupted in the middle of supper. It was unfortunately discourteous, but considering the amount of humiliation Anora was enduring to be there, it was a fair trade.

"Your Majesty." The arl bowed deeply before her. "Forgive the lack of a proper reception, but I was not aware you intended to call upon us personally. If you wish to speak with the Grey Wardens, I'm afraid they have not yet returned from the errand you sent them on."

"You are mistaken, Eamon," Anora replied coolly, letting a hint of a scolding tone color her voice. "I sent them upon no errand. I merely offered them information they might find helpful."

Perplexed, the arl frowned. He looked like he'd been to the Void and back, far older and more haggard since the last time she'd seen him at court. Clearly his rumored illness had taken its toll. "I see. Then, forgive me, Your Majesty, but I cannot fathom the purpose of your visit, and certainly," he glanced past her at the dozen or so guards that stood in rank and file behind her with their hands on their weapons. No doubt his own guard had already informed him that three dozen more waited outside in his courtyard, "not with so many of the royal guard in tow."

"Let me be frank, then, Eamon. I am here to take custody of the royal heir."

She wished she could let herself smile, or show the slightest hint of triumph, at his astonishment. Arl Eamon was a fine and skilled politician. She'd enjoyed jousting with him, and it wasn't every day she caught him completely flat-footed. The occasion, however, was far too solemn for any such display.

The arl collected himself quickly, clearing his throat. "Then... you admit the child's paternity, Your Majesty?"

"Do you know of any reason why I should doubt it?"

"None that I am aware of, Your Majesty. Anyone who has seen the child has remarked upon her resemblance to our late king."

Anora's mouth tightened, and she struggled against the impulse to wince. Was Eamon attempting to be cruel, gloating over her humiliation? Bad enough that she should have to concede publicly that her husband was a philanderer. Far worse, still, that she must admit another woman had fulfilled the duty Anora herself had not.

"I intend to see the babe for myself, but it never occurred to me to question my husband's word," she replied with an utter lack of reaction. "I received a duly witnessed and sealed document some months ago that had been discovered amongst my late husband's effects, acknowledging the affair with Lady Cousland and making arrangements to recognize any bastard that might be born of it. He wished the child to be raised according to her station, naturally. It was an honorable gesture and does our late king credit. I am, as always, his dutiful queen, and so I will see his wishes carried out."

"And what of the mother?" Eamon asked, folding his arms and giving her a stern, paternal look.

"What of her?"

"Forgive me, Your Majesty, but the document you claim to have makes no... provision... for her?"

Anora offered him a bland expression. "She's had the privilege of bearing the royal heir. With the child being recognized, the disgrace that would normally attach to a woman in her situation will be somewhat ameliorated. What other provision could she expect?"

Eamon's eyebrows lifted, and Anora wondered when it was that she had gotten better than the inveterate old schemer at lying through her teeth without speaking a single untruth.

"I think I would like to see this document, Your Majesty," he said sternly after a moment's consideration. "After all, you cannot expect me to hand over custody of a woman's child to you simply on your word that it was my nephew's wish. The child is my great-niece, and I have an obligation as her blood relative..."

"The document is safe in my study at the palace and there it shall remain. Your devotion to family is commendable, Eamon, but I must insist you produce the child and her nursemaid. The Grey Wardens were arrested earlier this evening, after breaking into Teyrn Howe's estate and killing him. They're currently imprisoned in Fort Drakon. Just days ago, Lady Cousland was heard to threaten the teyrn publicly. Even assuming she doesn't hang for her crime, I shall not leave my late husband's heir in the hands of a madwoman and a murderer."

"They were at Howe's estate on your information!" Eamon protested. "You cannot pretend you did not know what action Lady Cousland would take, with the information you dangled before her. This has all been set-up, clearly, and I must strenuously object to this action."

"I am not responsible for the rash and misguided actions of the Grey Wardens. As the royal heir, the child's person is property of the state; her upbringing is my purview. There will be no more debate, unless you care to bring this matter before the Landsmeet. Fetch her now, by order of your queen."

The arl looked as though he might argue, and Anora waited with her chin raised for him to do just that. The truth was, as queen-dowager, her claim to authority was merely courtesy, until the Landsmeet confirmed her as ruler in her own right. Eamon could easily refuse her on those grounds, but in so doing, he would show his own hand. It would hardly serve him to forewarn Anora that he intended to put himself forward as regent for the infant heir.

Grinding his teeth in frustration, Eamon did as she bade. Shortly, a woman appeared, carrying a swaddled bundle. Her clothing was simple and unadorned, but clean and well-kept. Her face, however, was pale and shaken. At her shoulder was an older woman with white hair, looking grim. A step behind her was an elf with fair hair and darkly tanned skin, wearing ill-fitting armor. Arl Eamon looked startled at his appearance.

"My lord, you cannot allow this!" the elderly woman protested.

"I have little choice, Enchanter Wynne," Eamon grumbled.

"Bring the child here," Anora instructed the wet-nurse imperiously, and with a curtsy, the farm-woman obeyed.

Her heart sank a little, when she peered at the babe's face, framed by tousled golden curls. Too much to hope, that Lady Cousland might have played Cailan false and attempted to pass another man's bastard off as the royal heir. Too much to hope that Cailan would have proven sterile and spared her this indignity.

This was undoubtedly her husband's child.

"What is her name?"

"Ella. I-I mean, C-Caila Eleanor, Your Majesty," the wet-nurse stammered. "For her ladyship's mother."

"No. She shall be named Celia Rowan, after my husband's mother, and my own," Anora announced. "We shall have a proper Naming for her once the Landsmeet is concluded. Eamon, have a servant bring the nursemaid's belongings to the palace."

She addressed her words to Eamon, before she turned and imperiously led her guard and the nursemaid out to the waiting carriages, but it was to the elf standing behind him that her eyes traveled in that final moment. Anora felt a chill run through her as he watched the proceedings silently, his face blank and expressionless. His armor and bearing suggested he was not a servant, but that wasn't what troubled her.

What troubled her were his eyes, for within their flat, brittle depths, was written death.

* * *

It was a galling realization, to know that a lifetime of preparation and work could be undone by a single failure.

It wasn't that the Landsmeet would necessarily discard six years of stellar management for want of an heir with the proper pedigree. True, the Theirin bloodline had symbolic value; having a Theirin on the throne was a statement of pride and defiance on the part of those who remembered all too well what it was to be under the heel of the Orlesians with a usurper upon the throne. Still, despite what her father assumed, not all the nobles were elitists like Eamon Guerrin whom, if truth be told, was more concerned with preserving his own family ties to the throne, and the power such a claim lent him, than in the symbolism of the Theirin monarchy.

No, if all things were equal, Anora had little doubt which way the Landsmeet would vote, if given the choice between the continuance of competent leadership or a regime change in the middle of a war.

That, of course, presupposed that all things were equal. Which they were not.

She had been reduced to little more than a figurehead by her own father, and that would no doubt hurt her cause by making her appear weak. This was doubly true since her father had made so many enemies during his regency, by the measures he'd had to take to bring the bannorn in line. The Landsmeet would be loathe to put their trust in a queen who had stood by and allowed her father to conduct a campaign of terror against her own people.

Even assuming she won their faith back, however, there was the issue of long-term stability. An unwed queen on the throne was an open-ended question. Would she remarry? If so, whom? Noblemen would be lining up to present themselves, or their sons, as potential candidates. But if she had failed to produce an heir for Cailan, how could they be certain she'd produce an heir with whomever she chose as prince-consort? Would there be another battle for the succession, decades hence?

Those were the advantages Eamon and the Cousland woman wielded, assuming they could convince the Landsmeet to accept a regency for an infant heir. They had opposed Loghain, while Anora had yielded her authority to him. Combined, they represented the two most powerful and well-established families in Ferelden, aside from the Theirin line. And they offered Ferelden the hope of a stable future beyond the immediate threat of the Blight.

It was a well-laid scheme, all told.

Thus it was that this pretty pink and gold girl-child was poised to be the undoing of a lifetime of Anora's labors. No matter how capable her leadership had been, no matter how competent a manager she was, no matter how adept she had become at keeping the bannorn in line, ultimately, Anora had failed in her foremost duty as queen. She had not produced an heir that would prevent a war of succession and ensure long-term stability for the realm.

That failure had, bit by bit, turned her marriage to a cold and bitter thing. Cailan had started out as a passionate husband, enamored of her since they were children. Anora had cherished him for his sweetness, his eagerness to please, and his willingness to leave the running of the country in her capable hands. He'd had the occasional dalliance, but he was typically discreet, and she found she could accept it gracefully enough.

But as the years wore on, and no heir was forthcoming, they had lost something between them. His visits to her chambers had become about duty, rather than about affection or pleasure. The more Cailan felt he _had_ to visit her bed, the less willing he was to do so. He'd always been like that, wanting what he was told he could not have and disdaining what he was told he _must_ do. The more reluctant he became to lie with her, the less pleasure she took in his doing so.

His dalliances had become protracted affairs, a stream of short-term mistresses. He became less discreet and _that_ had hurt; not that he would stray, but that he would be so inconsiderate as to expose her to humiliation. Ultimately, their marriage had become little more than the political alliance their fathers had originally envisioned when betrothing them. Anora's only solace, then, had been her duty in managing the affairs of the realm, and the fact that none of Cailan's mistresses had conceived either.

Ah, but she had hoped it had been his failure, rather than her own, that prevented an heir!

One failure that hadn't even been a failure, and the work of a lifetime would be wasted. And so Anora found herself without a choice.

The wet-nurse looked pale and awed and dropped into a curtsy as a royal guard opened the door to the impromptu nursery and Anora swept in. No doubt the woman had never seen so elegant a room in her entire life, much less anticipated living in the royal palace. Still, the woman chewed her lip nervously and seemed conflicted when Anora gestured her away and approached the cradle to look down at her new ward.

"Leave us," Anora commanded, but the woman hesitated.

"Your pardon, Your Majesty, but her ladyship would take it amiss if I left the babe unsupervised."

Anora blinked slowly, as it gradually registered that this peasant woman was _arguing_ with her.

"What 'her ladyship' prefers is none of my concern. The child is my ward, and you are now under my employ. Do as I say, or you shall be replaced."

Still the wet-nurse persisted. "Replace me if you like, Your Majesty. But her ladyship has been kind. She loves her babe madly, and I'll not allow harm to come to the child while I've breath left in my body!"

Astonished, Anora stared at the farmwife, who stood trembling and terrified, yet resolute all the same, poised to leap to the babe's defense if needed.

"What is your name, good woman?"

"Muirne Keegan, Your Majesty." She bobbed another quick curtsy.

"Well, Mistress Keegan, I commend you for your diligence to your charge, but if I were of a mind to harm the child, I would first have my guard imprison or kill you, and then have one of _them_ dispose of the babe." Anora smiled slightly as the wet-nurse paled even further. "This child is my husband's, and I do not take her welfare lightly. She is safe with me, but if you're so concerned, you may take yourself to the other side of the room and hover there while I become better acquainted."

Bowing again, the nursemaid did as she was told, fidgeting anxiously on the far side of the nursery while Anora peered down at the sleeping babe.

"Well, Princess Celia," she sighed. "Whatever shall we do with you? I can't allow you to lie at my back like a weapon to be turned upon me, but I assure you, I'm doing you no favors raising you to your proper station. It's a hollow and lonely excuse for a childhood, being raised to rule a nation. You might very well be better off a bastard, if only your mother and Eamon had the wit to know it."

The rosy face crumpled, the small bottom lip pouting out. The babe looked charmingly anxious as she squirmed uncomfortably. Anora thought she might begin to cry, but she settled after a moment, frowning as though troubled by ill dreams.

"I cannot spare you the burden you must carry, I'm afraid. We all have our duty. Yours is to prepare yourself for the day Ferelden will look to you to lead her, and mine is to swallow my failure and mortification and attempt to find some kindness as I guide you, despite all you represent. I promise you, I shall try, though I may not always be equal to the task."

The babe frowned again and began to mewl softly, and a distinct odor wafted up from the cradle. Anora drew back as though burned.

"See to your charge, Mistress Keegan," she said, somewhat awkwardly, striding toward the door. "I shall come once a day to inspect the princess and check on her welfare. Feel free to ask the chamberlain for anything you might have need of to tend to the babe."

* * *

The morning brought troubling report from the captain of the royal guard.

"The wet-nurse we brought to the palace last night has fallen ill, Your Majesty," he announced after rising from his bow.

"Ill? Is it... the Blight sickness?"

"We cannot say, Your Majesty. The maid who brought her breakfast told the chamberlain she was feverish this morning, pale and sweating, unable to rise from her bed even to care for the babe."

"I see. We cannot take any chances. Get her away from the princess immediately. And convey my apologies and blessings to her, before you give her mercy."

With another bow, the captain left, and Anora paced her study anxiously. Within hours, she would need another wet-nurse. After what happened to Bann Grainne's unfortunate babe, she did not dare attempt to have the infant fed on cow's milk or thin gruel. But suitable women were in short supply. The privations of the Blight were taking their toll on the health of the populace, and she did not dare search among the refugees massing outside the city walls, for any of them might carry the corruption.

There was no help for it.

Opening the door to her study, she faced the guard who stood watch outside. "Send word to Fort Drakon. Have Lady Cousland released and brought to the palace at once."


	55. Chapter Fifty Five: Captives

Rìona woke with a whimper, awareness assaulting her like a bucketful of icy water. She lay on a bed of filthy straw within an iron-barred cell at Fort Drakon. Distantly, she could hear the moans and screams of other prisoners. Her head was pillowed upon Alistair's thigh, and he slept sitting upright, leaning against the stone wall with his arm draped protectively across her. Beneath her, the straw rustled, and reflexively, Rìona began to scratch at itches both real and imagined, as she pondered what vermin must infest the straw.

Her belly was sticky with half-dried milk that had leaked from her breasts as she slept, and filthy with the dirt and dust the straw had collected, which had combined with the drying streams of milk to leave dark gray lines across her skin. Her breasts throbbed abominably, achingly engorged. Rìona had no idea how long she'd been in the cell—a day, perhaps—but the agony of her overfull breasts made it clear it had been far too long.

She needed to get back to her babe. Wynne had cautioned her against going too long without suckling Ella. Without relief, the painful pressure could become a blockage, which could become infected and make her desperately ill.

She must find a way to get back to Ella. Assuming, of course, that Ella was even still at Arl Eamon's estate. Rìona doubted it. The moment she realized how neatly she'd been lured away with bait she couldn't refuse, she knew what Anora's true objective had been.

"You're polishin' the wrong knob," drawled a lazy voice from behind her. "That bloke there can't make things any easier on you."

Beneath her cheek, she felt Alistair's muscles go rigid. The voice had awoken him. He said nothing, however. They had agreed in whispered consultation what she would attempt, if given the opportunity. He wasn't happy about it, but he wouldn't interfere. The stakes were too high.

"And I suppose you could?" How easily her mother's lessons came back to her, telling her how to add just the right note of disdain, to challenge a man to prove himself rather than make him feel rejected.

"Depends on how motivated I am," the guard replied as Rìona turned to face him. He wore Howe's crest on his pauldron; apparently the royal prison was under the control of the Arl of Denerim, and there hadn't been enough time since Howe's death to affect a change in that situation. "I can get food beyond the gruel most of the prisoners here get. A bit of bread or cheese in your belly from time to time, clean water to drink, maybe a blanket for your straw. Well, unless you like keeping company with your itchy little friends there. I'm not above showing a bit of kindness—assuming I'm shown some kindness in return."

Rìona lifted her shoulders, displaying her swollen breasts to full advantage. "I can be... kind."

"Maker, look at you!" the guard sighed, licking his lips. "I'm sure you have plenty of... kindness... to spare. Come closer to the door. Let's see just how kind you can be."

Forcing her face to an impassive mask, Rìona rose and slowly approached the iron bars of the door. She wanted to clutch her arms across her breasts, to stop their swaying, ease their atrocious aching. She hadn't eaten since they'd left Arl Eamon's estate, she felt ill with hunger. Somehow, she managed to contort her nauseated grimace into something resembling an inviting smile.

The guard grinned as she approached. "If I like what I see, I'll open the door. I've got a clean bunk in the barracks, and a loaf of bread you can have."

Rìona heard Alistair move behind her and silently prayed he would not to interfere. This wasn't what they had discussed. She was supposed to lure the guard into the cell, if she could, where she and Alistair could knock him unconscious and take his keys. Still, she thought, swallowing nervously, if it meant finding a way to free them and return to Ella, she'd do it. She'd fuck every guard in Fort Drakon, if she had to, if it was the only way to get to her babe, though Alistair would no doubt despise her for it.

The guard reached through the bars and ran a finger down the slope of her breast. Rìona closed her eyes, shuddering in revulsion, as it brushed across her enlarged aureola and distended nipple. Then her eyes flew open as she felt a familiar tingling tension within her breasts. Cursing, the guard jerked away, a look of disgust contorting his face as rivulets of milk began streaming from her nipples.

Ah, Maker! Rìona wanted to weep in a mad combination of relief and despair. Clearly, she thought bitterly, the guard was not one of the men who found a woman's milk erotic. Wiping his hand as though he'd touched something filthy, he stormed away from the cell, his keys still firmly secured at his waist.

"Blast it all!" Rìona muttered, rubbing her breast. More streams of milk flowed at the pressure. It relieved the aching, slightly. "You know, it occurs to me—somewhat belatedly—that very few of the seductions I've attempted since Ostagar have actually worked out according to plan. I'm frankly astonished Cailan succumbed. It may be time for me to rethink my approach."

"That was a bluff, right?" Alistair demanded, pushing himself up off the straw. "You weren't really going to go with him if he opened the door?"

Rìona glanced away. "I have to get us out of here."

_"Rìona..."_

"I'm sorry, Alistair. I know you don't approve, but if it's the only way..."

"Setting aside the fact that I would have torn that guard limb from bloody limb with my bare hands before I let him take you out of my sight, Maker's blood, woman! Have you gone completely _mad?_" He flung an angry arm at the barred door, and the empty hallway down which the guard had disappeared. "These are Howe's men. You just killed their lord, and even if you hadn't, they're _vile._ You're not going to do Ella a bit of good if you let them hurt you, and they would, and they'd bloody enjoy doing it!"

"That woman has my child!"

"You don't know that!"

"I do!" Rìona snapped. "You were absolutely right. We shouldn't have taken her bait. I was so _certain_ she would do everything she could to discredit any attempt to claim Ella was Cailan's child, that it never occurred to me she would try to use Ella against me, instead."

"What could she hope to accomplish by it?"

"She could simply intend to employ Howe's scheme, to use Ella as a hostage against our cooperation. She could force us to support Loghain's claim to the regency, or extort us into incriminating ourselves as traitors. But that seems... crude." Rìona shrugged. "Everything my parents ever said of Anora indicated she was a much subtler sort of politician. Still, after what Loghain has done and allowed Howe to do, I'd put nothing past his daughter."

Alistair frowned. "Why not just kill us outright? We could be dead by now. Why hold us here and go to all this trouble?"

"Perhaps it's more important to discredit us. With the correspondence we conducted back in Redcliffe in preparation for the Landsmeet, we've raised further doubts about Loghain that undermine his claim to the regency. If the queen can use Ella to coerce us into confessing before we're executed, it legitimizes everything Loghain has done. The civil war will be over and the Landsmeet will throw their full support behind Loghain."

"And what happens to Ella, then?" Alistair asked bleakly. "If we're executed, I mean?"

"I don't know," Rìona whispered. "If she's merciful, Anora might send Ella to be raised as an orphan by the Chantry. But... she had no qualms about sacrificing her father's closest ally to lure us into her trap, which indicates a ruthlessness that frightens me. Ella poses a threat to Anora's future heirs, assuming she ever has any. She might be willing to kill anyone, even a helpless babe, to see her objectives met."

"Could she really be that cold-blooded?"

"After what we've seen here in Denerim? The things she has sat by and allowed to happen? How can you doubt it?"

"Do you think Zevran might have gotten to Ella first? Gotten her to safety?"

"I don't know. Maker, I hope so."

With nothing to do other than wait and worry, she and Alistair settled back down onto the straw. Her breasts continued to ache tightly and leak droplets of milk. No amount of squeezing or massaging could express enough milk to ease her discomfort, and with no privacy, she found she couldn't ask Alistair to assist her. Not with leering guards walking past. She would attempt to lure one of them into carelessness if she could, but she wouldn't put herself and Alistair on display for them. To expose such an intimacy—even if there was no passion behind it—was simply unthinkable.

Strangely, she didn't feel weepy. Her emotions, which had been so raw and ragged through her pregnancy and especially since Ella was born, were now suddenly cold and clear. Her fear was too deep for hysterics, too profound for tears. Only one thing mattered, and that was having her daughter in her arms again. She would not panic or succumb to despair; instead, she awaited her opportunity with a calculating calm that Zevran might have envied.

Leaning her head on Alistair's shoulder, at length she managed to rest again. 

* * *

"Warden, you're to come with us."

Royal guards, a dozen of them all told. Their swords remained sheathed, but their hands were on the hilts, as though they expected two naked and unarmed prisoners to attack them. The Fort Drakon guards wearing Howe's device gave them resentful glares, which the royal guards ignored disdainfully.

Interesting. Clearly the royal guard approved no more of the thugs Howe had employed than Rìona did.

She and Alistair both stood, but the guard captain who had spoken shook his head quickly. "Not you, ser. Only her."

"Not bloody likely!" Belligerently, Alistair inserted himself between Rìona and the open door of their cell, his fists doubled and up at his sides, ready to swing.

"Alistair, stop," Rìona murmured, laying a hand on his shoulder. "They're being somewhat courteous. Let's return the favor. Where is it I'm expected to go, Guard-Captain?"

"The queen commands your presence, Grey Warden."

"And what of Warden Alistair?"

"You're both still under charges of murder and treason. He'll remain here, and you'll be returned here when the queen no longer requires you."

"Unacceptable," Rìona declared. The guard-captain left her with little room to maneuver, but she needed to create an opening for both of them. "I don't trust what these swine Howe called guards will do to him. They're torturing prisoners here; I've heard the screams. Surely you've seen evidence of such yourself."

"My duty is to protect the queen and defend the palace, Grey Warden. What the Arl of Denerim's men do with their prisoners isn't my jurisdiction." He said the last with a bitter twist that indicated he wasn't happy with that state of affairs. Rìona wondered just what sort of fault-lines were running through the power structure here in Denerim, between Howe's men and Loghain's and Anora's, that gave rise to these rivalries.

"Rìona, just go," Alistair said, his voice tense. "If you're right about Ella..."

_... this is your chance._ The unspoken conclusion hung between them. But though Rìona longed to get to her babe so desperately it was an actual physical ache, she shook her head stubbornly.

"I can't leave you here!"

"You can! Make sure Ella's all right. Find out what Anora wants from us. I'll be all right. Let these bastards do their worst, if they have the stones to open the door in the first place."

That provoked a low grumbling from Howe's men, and the guard-captain gave an impatient sigh.

"This is not an invitation, Grey Warden," he stated flatly, and tossed Rìona the gown she'd worn to Howe's estate. He did not, she noticed, include the chainmail shirt she'd added to the ensemble, nor any weapon. Feeling self-conscious under the watching eyes, she quickly dragged the simple shift over her head, and then the woolen kirtle.

As it settled around her body, she looked anxiously at Alistair again, but he shook his head. "Just go, love. Get to Ella. Worry about me later."

Reluctance weighed down each step she took toward the door of their cell, until finally she was through it and it closed with a clang behind her. The royal guard-captain who had come for her turned to the guard who seemed to be in charge of the Fort Drakon company.

"With the Arl of Denerim dead, you now work for the queen, until another arl can be appointed. Her Majesty will want this prisoner alive and unharmed. Do I make myself clear?"

With another resentful glare, the guard gave a jerky nod. Two of the royal guardsmen took hold of Rìona's arms on either side, as though afraid she would bolt, and escorted her from the prison.

An unadorned, windowless carriage—barely more than a wooden box on wheels—carried Rìona to the royal palace, situated at the foot of the mountain into which the prison had been built. There, the guard-captain left her with a trio of guards and Anora's maidservant Erlina.

The Orlesian elf escorted Rìona to a modest bedchamber—the servants' quarters, she thought, glancing at the simple appointments—where a bath had been prepared. Just what was Anora playing at? As either a Grey Warden or the presumed Teyrna of Highever, simple courtesy would dictate that Rìona be granted better quarters than these, unless Anora intended to deny Rìona all recognition as a noblewoman and Grey Warden.

The guards took station at the only door to the chamber, leaving Erlina and Rìona alone within.

"Is my child here, or is this another trap like the last one you baited for me?" Rìona asked caustically, balking at the prospect of doing anything before she had seen Ella with her own eyes.

"You will be permitted to see the princess once you have bathed," Erlina replied implacably, apparently unconcerned with the role she had played in Rìona's capture. "It is my lady's command. We do not know what you might have been exposed to at Fort Drakon. It is for the babe's welfare, of course"

"The princess?" Rìona's eyebrows arched as she quickly shed her clothing and stepped into the bath. She scrubbed the sticky black streaks of mingled dried milk and dust from her breasts and belly with rapid, eager strokes of a linen cloth. Thinking of the filthy straw upon which she had slept, she dunked her head under the water and took a bar of stringent soap to her scalp, praying it wasn't too late to prevent an infestation. Resolving to shave her head if she felt so much as an itch once her hair was dry again, lest any vermin be transferred to Ella, she emerged from the bath and dried off briskly.

The maidservant presented her with a clean shift and kirtle, the cut of which was far more modest than the one she had worn before when posing as a whore to gain access to Howe's estate. It was well-made and cut of fine cloth, but ill-fitting, made for a taller woman with narrower hips and breasts that weren't full to bursting with milk. The pressure of the bodice alone was enough to bring droplets of milk to her nipples, and her breasts began to ache again, tense and tingling.

"Take me to my babe, now," Rìona said shortly, and with a gesture that was somewhere between a bow and a nod, Erlina led her from the bedchamber. The guards fell into step behind them as she was led not to the Presence Chamber where she would have expected to be received by the queen, but to an elegant suite in another wing of the palace far from the one in which Rìona had bathed. Before the door even opened, Rìona heard a distant squalling cry that she would have known anywhere.

"Ella!" she gasped as the wet patches over her breasts began to spread. Erlina scarcely had an opportunity to open the door before Rìona barged through it, not waiting for the maidservant to properly announce her presence.

"Where is my babe?" she demanded, startling the queen with her utter lack of ceremony. "Bring her to me now!"

It had been nearly six years since Rìona had seen the queen, the day Anora had been wed to Cailan in the Landsmeet Chamber. Rìona had been barely more than a child, then, somewhat awestruck at being in the presence of the king and queen and all the assembled nobility. Now she saw, not an object of admiration but an adversary, the woman who had taken her child. She wondered if the guards would reach her in time to save the queen, if Rìona attacked her outright. If Anora attempted to keep her apart from Ella, she'd put that question to the test, Rìona resolved.

Anora drew herself up, clearly taking umbrage at Rìona's reckless command. But then her large blue eyes widened at the sight of Rìona, her bodice stained with spreading circles of moisture, and she snapped her fingers at another maidservant.

"Bring the princess, now!" she ordered imperiously, and the maid hastened to obey. The servant ducked into an attached chamber and returned a moment later, accompanied by another maidservant who held the swaddled babe in her arms, attempting to pacify the squalling infant with a sugar-teat. Rìona whimpered at the surge of pressure in her breasts and practically snatched Ella from the maid's arms. She did not wait for permission before seating herself, tearing at the laces of her bodice with a shaking hand.

It ached, when Ella latched on and milk began flowing, a cramping twinge deep within her breast. Her unoccupied nipple leaked copiously as the babe began suckling from the proffered one.

"By all means, make yourself comfortable," the queen invited with a wry twist. "Erlina, find the Warden another gown, the one she has will need laundering, no doubt."

Rìona's sense of panicked hysteria began to abate, soothed by the babe in her arms. Nursing Ella was like a balm for her soul, anxiety bleeding away into relief that was not merely physical. There was a sense of rightness that came with having Ella near her, making other concerns seem paler and less pressing. She hadn't realized she would feel this way, all the long months of her pregnancy. She'd known her babe would be beloved, but she hadn't understood the _need_ which would drive her, not only to protect Ella, but simply to be with her.

Rìona ducked her head, tears burning her eyes as she gazed down at Ella's sweet, beloved face. Crooning, she stroked the babe's soft golden curls and round, silken cheek with feather-light fingers, whispering to Ella nonsensical endearments and words of devotion.

She would not risk losing Ella again, no matter what the lure. In that moment, she realized, nothing else mattered. No title, no duty, no fragment of honor. She would sacrifice it all, if it meant keeping her child in her arms. She'd lie to the Maker himself, ignite Andraste's pyre with her own hands, but she would not let anyone take her babe from her again.


	56. Chapter Fifty Six: Hegira

Alistair leaned against the bars on the far side of his cell, away from the door and the guard who patrolled back and forth before it. He thought of Zevran as he attempted to paste what was meant to be an insolent sneer on his face. He tried to emulate Zev's cocky ease and self-assurance as he crossed his arms before him and waited for the guard's agitated pacing to bring him back before Alistair's cell.

"What are you staring at?" the guard demanded shortly.

Alistair shrugged indolently, lifting his hand to examine the grime embedded around his nails. He wasn't certain how long he'd been in Fort Drakon—the royal guards had taken Rìona only hours ago—but it was long enough for him to wish for a hot bath. He'd been spoiled, in the months since they emerged from the Deep Roads, adapting easily to the ever-ready presence of clean sheets, and servants who could draw a hot bath on request, as Arl Eamon's did.

"I just had a question I thought maybe you could answer for me."

"Yeah, and what's that?"

"How does it feel to be totally useless?"

It was insane, he realized, to try to provoke a confrontation with a fully armed and armored man when he himself was nude and unarmed, but it was either that, or try to seduce the guard himself. He didn't trust himself to be clever enough to pull off any sort of ruse like feigning illness, but he'd baited a bully a time or ten in his years at the monastery.

Though never had the stakes been quite this high. He was getting out of here, one way or another. If this didn't work, he _would_attempt to seduce the next guard to come on duty. However it played out, he was getting out of this prison and getting to Rìona and Ella. Arl Eamon and politics be hanged, he would get them out of Denerim, out of Ferelden if that was what it took. What he wasn't going to do was sit here in this cell for another day, another hour, wondering if they were all right.

"Ha! Useless, am I?" The guard stopped his measured pacing to scoff at Alistair. "I'm not the one locked in a cage waiting to get his neck stretched for treason."

"No, you're just the one bent over a barrel by the queen's guard, standing there with a sword you can't use." Alistair smirked, trying to load his voice with innuendo the way Zevran and Rìona managed to do so easily. "Of course, seeing the way you didn't even know what to do with a woman when she offered herself to you earlier, that shouldn't surprise me."

The guard's face flushed, veins standing out on his brow as his eyes bulged at Alistair. He grabbed the hilt of his sword and had it half drawn before he managed to splutter a response, spittle flying from his lips.

"You think I won't gut you?" He demanded angrily, slamming his sword back into its scabbard as he realized he'd never be able to reach Alistair through the bars of the cell. "Queen's guard ain't here. You'd be another body on the pyres before they ever find out what I done."

Alistair forced himself not to abandon his casual, slouched posture, even as he pushed extraneous thoughts aside and attempted to summon his willpower. Unarmed and naked, Alistair's only chance for survival would be to smite the guard the instant the door to the cell was opened and grab his sword while he was still stunned.

Maker help him if the guard managed to resist being smitten.

"Go ahead," Alistair jeered. "Do you worst. Or are you too afraid of the royal guard?"

Alistair felt the metallic tang of battle-readiness sour his breath as the guard jerked his keys off his belt. He nearly had the key inserted in the lock of the cell door before he looked up and met Alistair's gaze with angry, resentful eyes.

Abruptly, he subsided and jerked the keys away from the door, and Alistair knew he'd given too much away, failed to conceal his eagerness.

Blight take it!

"Sod it," the guard muttered, scowling. "I'd rather see you dance on a gibbet."

Alistair snarled, charging the bars of the cell, "Get back here, you coward! Open this door and I'll show you just what a Grey—"

A near-scalding torrent of arterial blood splashed across Alistair's face and chest, clouding his vision in a sheet of red as it clung to his eyelashes. He had an instant of shocked incomprehension as he blinked the crimson fluid away, hearing rather than seeing the guard's body fall to the stone floor.

When his vision cleared, there was Zevran, splattered in gore, his beautiful pale hair clumped into stiff strands with drying blood. He gave Alistair a feral look that Alistair wasn't entirely certain was actually supposed to be a smile, and grabbed the keys the guard had dropped when he died.

"A useful distraction, _cariño,_" he said as he unlocked the cell door. "Thank you. Where are they keeping Rìona?"

"I think she's at the palace. The royal guard came and took her away some hours ago. Is Ella all right?"

"She is gone," Zevran answered tonelessly. "Your queen took her."

Just as Rìona had suspected. "Then Rìona must be with her," he said, relieved. Without thinking, Alistair touched Zevran's blood-soaked hair, dropping his hand when Zevran ducked away. "Maker! Did you fight your way in here?"

"We did," Leliana replied, her voice heavy with censure as she opened a nearby trunk and dug out Alistair's clothing and armor. "I had intended a ruse to get us inside without needless bloodshed, but the moment we reached the first guards, Zevran just attacked."

"Even if we had gotten in without bloodshed, do you think we would have made it out the same way?" Zevran asked scornfully.

"Perhaps!" Leliana snapped. "We may have been able to disguise Alistair as a guard and pretend he was escorting us back out. You never gave it a chance!"

Zevran gave her a cold stare. "I am an assassin, bard, in case you have forgotten. My business is death. Play your trifling games of intrigue on someone else's time."

"Am I missing something?" Alistair asked slowly, glancing back and forth between the two of them.

Zevran turned his flat, empty eyes to Alistair, and Alistair shivered, swallowing hard. All the months of traveling and fighting together, all the time they had spent getting to know one another, learning to be together, and suddenly it was as though the Zevran he'd come to know was completely gone.

This, he realized, was the assassin, the Antivan Crow. If there was any feeling in Zevran, any question or emotion, it was so far buried Alistair wasn't certain he could find it even if he searched.

"Zev?"

Something flickered in Zevran's eyes, an instant of something warmer, something that offered reassurance, there and just as suddenly gone. And then there were only those cold, stranger's eyes in Zevran's familiar face.

"Later," Zevran said without inflection. "Let us get your armor on and go."

By the time Alistair was armed, more guards were indeed arriving, in clusters of four or six, groups of city guards who had been summoned off patrol at the first hint of trouble. They should have met up elsewhere and attacked the prison in force, Alistair thought with a shake of his head as he charged one such group. Zevran and Leliana had killed everyone in command at Fort Drakon. The guards were arriving, looking for someone to report to for a status report and orders, and stumbling blindly into Zevran's merciless onslaught.

Alistair had never seen him fight this way. Zevran was utterly quiet. There were no quips, no lusty laughs, no boasting of his own prowess or taunts about his foes' lack thereof. He did not toy with his opponents or brawl for the sheer fun of scrapping. With silent, brutal efficiency, he slid in and out of the shadows as Alistair charged the new arrivals, using the distraction Alistair provided as an opportunity to rip a dagger across an exposed throat or thrust it into an unguarded kidney.

For all his silence, there was something furious about Zevran's kills. Those hot spurts from severed throats were deliberate. Alistair knew Zevran could kill neatly, but it seemed he _wanted_to make their deaths messy, painting the prison with their blood. Those vivid splashes somehow expressed more contempt than any mockery Alistair had ever heard Zevran deliver in battle.

The guards they engaged as they fought their way out of the Fort Drakon seemed increasingly like victims being led to a slaughter, rather than enemies fairly met. They weren't opponents, they were _marks_, all of them. Selected for death by Zevran, he held their life in his hands for an instant, and then threw it away with a careless and disdainful splatter.

Once outside the prison, Zevran led them to a bath-house attached to the eerily empty barracks. The men who had slept here last night were now all dead.

"Quickly," he snapped at Alistair and Leliana, stripping off his own armor and flinging it aside. "Wash the blood off. We cannot traipse through the city looking like we just came from an abattoir. Find other armor. We do not have time to clean ours."

Zevran drew one bucket of frigid water after another from the well, dumping it over himself to sluice the blood away, dunking his head in a basin until the rivulets streaming from his hair were no longer pink. His swarthy skin was blue-tinged by the time he was done, but he never so much as shivered or muttered a complaint.

Alistair got the impression this was something Zevran had done before, washing himself of the blood of his victims to make an unobtrusive escape.

Exchanging a worried glance with Leliana, Alistair did as Zevran commanded. Thoughts of self-consciousness in front of Leliana were the farthest thing from Alistair's mind as he stripped off the stolen armor he'd worn into Howe's estate before they were captured. He doused himself in ice-cold water drawn from the well and used some dead man's shirt as a cloth to rub his bloodstained skin clean. He and Leliana didn't have nearly as much work to do to get clean as Zevran had, for Leliana had fought with her bow from a distance and Alistair had only been present for a small portion of the mayhem. Leliana was able to salvage her armor with a few strokes on an oiled cloth, but Alistair had to exchange his for yet another confiscated set scavenged from the stores in the barracks.

"Do you know anything of the palace?" Zevran asked once they were away from Fort Drakon, following him through narrow alleys behind the manors lining the palace district.

Alistair shook his head. "I've never been there. Arl Eamon brought me to Denerim once or twice when I was a boy, but I stayed on his estate."

Zevran muttered a curse. "Then I shall have to reconnoiter, determine where she is being held and the best way to get to her. Ah! I had hoped we could get her free tonight."

"Wait. You're not serious. You want to _assault the palace?_"

Hostility flashed behind Zevran's eyes, quickly quelled by that chillingly blank look. "Your queen, she wants to take our daughter from us, permanently."

"_What?_" Stunned, Alistair quit walking and grabbed Zevran's arm. "Rìona thought Anora would try to use Ella as leverage, to blackmail us into... Maker, I don't even know, I can't even fathom what she wants out of it. Confessions of plotting to kill Cailan and colluding with Orlais, maybe. How could she even...? Arl Eamon just allowed this?"

"She has convinced Arl Eamon that she is entitled to claim custody of King Cailan's heir," Leliana said softly. "I... overheard... the arl telling Bann Teagan that he is no longer certain he can trust the Wardens, that perhaps Loghain is telling the truth. Not about you, of course. He assumes you would never be part of any such plot. But he wonders if Rìona didn't see an opportunity to put herself on the throne when she turned out to be carrying King Cailan's babe. Even if we do get her out of the palace, I worry that she will not be welcome at the arl's estate any longer."

"Oh, Maker's balls," Alistair groaned. "Considerations of what this may do to our efforts to end the Blight aside, that raises the question of what Anora _does_ want with Rìona at the palace. I had assumed she was taken there to hear Anora's demands for Ella's safe return. But if Anora wants actual _custody_of Cailan's child..."

"Then Rìona meets your queen's purposes better if she is dead, for then no one can contest the claim." The calm simplicity with which Zevran made his analysis made it all the more terrifying.

"No one knows she was taken to the palace, except me and a handful of the royal guard," Alistair muttered with mounting panic. "Anora could tell people anything she wanted about how Rìona died at Fort Drakon and no one would be the wiser. We've got to get them out of there!"

"Maker's breath!" Leliana rounded on him angrily. "Not you as well! Get hold of yourselves! Both of you. Especially you, Zevran! Think for a moment. If the queen wanted Rìona dead, why bring her to the palace at all? Why not simply order her death at Fort Drakon? You both could have been dead long before we rescued you."

Zevran shook his head stubbornly, glaring at Leliana. "You think this queen would be the first to simply take pleasure in watching her rival die?"

"We have no reason to assume that! What if there's another purpose? What if the queen does want something else from Rìona? You said we'll have to reconnoiter anyway. Breaching the palace will be difficult, perhaps impossible. I realize you're upset, Zevran, but if you can set your bloodlust aside and stop trying to panic Alistair, perhaps we might begin to work out just what the queen's angle is."

"Her angle does not matter," Zevran said implacably. "She has taken our daughter, and for that she will die."

"Whoa, whoa, wait!" His words hit Alistair like a cold bucket of water, dispelling panic and replacing it with consternation. "Kill the queen? Are you mad? I mean, if she's hurt or intends to hurt Rìona, then yes, absolutely, I'll be the first in line. But Leliana's right. We can't just jump to conclusions. We need more to go on."

"If we delay, Rìona may be dead and Ella beyond our reach."

"And if we're wrong, we confirm every lie Loghain and Howe have told about us! Rìona will be dead, anyway, and me as well. We'd be hunted, because we'll be traitors, without even Arl Eamon's support."

"We will take them far away, where no one can touch them, as you once claimed to want to do."

"We can't do that." Alistair tugged furiously at his braided queue. "We have a duty. We need to get Arl Eamon back on our side and take down Loghain so we can end this Blight!"

"I shit on your Fereldan politics and your duty and your Blight!" Zevran snarled, erupting in fury. The empty chill of his eyes was replaced with fierce rage that was no less terrifying and promised no less carnage. "These people have touched my family and that is _not_allowed!"

"You think I don't feel the same?" Alistair demanded. "You don't think I want to rip the heads off anyone standing between us and them? But think for a moment, Zev! The queen is Loghain's daughter. If you kill Anora, he will hunt us down."

"And just what is it he has been doing this past year, with the bounty hunters and mercenaries? You think the Crows were paid such a generous fee so that I might warm your bed?"

"That may be true, but this time he'll have all of Ferelden behind him. There will be no place we can hide, no ally we can turn to. How can we protect Ella like that? If we handle this wrong, we lose everything. _Everything._And if Rìona were here right now, you know she'd say the exact same thing."

Zevran glared at him with that murderous anger, but Alistair found himself strangely calm in the face of all the barely-contained violence quivering through Zevran's primed muscles. It was like trying to calm a frightened mabari, knowing it might lunge for your throat at any second. But even knowing he ran the risk of losing his fingers to the wicked blades of Zevran's daggers, he extended his hand to Zevran, stopping just short of actually caressing his face. An inch, perhaps, between his fingertips and Zevran's tattooed cheek.

"We'll get them back, Zev. I swear it. But I need you with me. I need you. _Please._"

Abruptly, something deflated in Zevran, humanity leaching back into his eyes. He closed that distance, moving toward Alistair's reaching hand, and without thought, without hesitation, Alistair pulled him into a rough embrace. Relief flooded through Alistair, leaving him with a nearly nauseous feeling in his gut as his tension abruptly faded. He pressed a quick, hard kiss to Zevran's lips before releasing him.

He wasn't sure what it meant that Zevran looked startled for a moment. Had circumstances been different, Alistair might have questioned whether his display of affection was welcome, but this wasn't the time to figure out if he'd overstepped one of Zevran's unspoken boundaries.

"All right, for now we need to handle this as a matter of politics. We need to be sure to get Arl Eamon firmly back into our camp, and we need to find out what exactly it is Anora wants and see what we can offer her in trade. It's late. Let's get some rest, and we'll talk to Eamon in the morning."

"All right," Leliana echoed, as Zevran gave a slight nod. "This way."

Alistair frowned. "But Arl Eamon's estate is past the Market District."

"We are not going back there," Zevran said, and there was anger simmering in his voice. "After he allowed Ella to be taken from his home and expressed doubts about our Rìona's honesty, Leliana suggested we may have worn out our welcome, or made ourselves too indebted to his hospitality."

"So... where are we staying, then?"

"The Cousland estate was abandoned," Leliana replied, taking the lead to guide them through the alleys away from the palace. "Apparently Arl Howe ran out of funds enough to maintain two households, and so he withdrew the men he had occupying the estate and dismissed the servants. The manor house has been mistreated. Wynne has spent all day cleaning it, and making Shale and Sten break and chop the damaged furniture into firewood, but it's still usable. We will stay there."

By the time they reached the quiet manor house, all but Shale were asleep. Shale was stationed before the front entrance, and apparently all the other entrances had been barricaded, since they had no guards to patrol the estate. The sporadic sleep, and constant worry of his stay in Fort Drakon, began to tell on Alistair as he trudged wearily toward the bedchamber to which Leliana directed him, which was clearly the lord's chambers. The walls were strangely empty, devoid of paintings or tapestries, the shelves barren of gold and silver plate. Whatever elegance the echoing manor house had was a shadow of its former state.

But the armor he had inherited from Cailan was there, carried from Arl Eamon's estate and arrayed on an armor stand. He hated the sight of it; he had much preferred the armor they'd found at Soldier's Peak. He'd loved wearing the griffon crest and he felt like a fraud in Cailan's golden armor. Still, he was grateful to his companions for remembering to bring it.

Alistair stripped off the armor he had scavenged from the dead guards at Fort Drakon and left it lying where it fell. He crawled onto the massive bed and barely registered Zevran banking the fire and gathering up the armor he had dropped, before he fell asleep.

He didn't know how many hours later it was that he awoke to a soft clang. Zevran flew from the bed, his dagger glinting in the red glow of the embers on the hearth, while Alistair was still attempting to rouse enough to comprehend that they were being attacked. There was a sound of a fist hitting flesh, and then a strangled cry as the dagger flashed down.

"Taliesen!" Alistair heard Zevran hiss. Awareness finally penetrated, and Alistair rolled from the bed to seize his sword, turning circles as he surveyed the room for other threats.

A shadow moved by the window on the far side of the bed, and there was another clang, similar to the one that had awoken them. Only as he lunged for the shadow and skewered it did he realized that Zevran had placed the armor Alistair had discarded beneath the windows to the bedchamber, to alert them if anyone climbed in.

Another shadow was already coming through the window, and Alistair ran it through without hesitation. It fell back out the window with a decidedly feminine cry, plummeting two stories down onto the flagged courtyard below. Outside, there were shouts of consternation as whatever other attackers waiting outside realized the windows were guarded and unassailable. In the faint autumn moonlight, Alistair saw a half dozen or so figures flee from the courtyard back into the city.

"They are gone?" Zevran asked.

Alistair glanced out the window again, careful not to stick his head out and make a target of himself. All was silent, and no more shadows moved. "As far as I can tell."

Zevran looked down. "You should have stayed away, Taliesen."

"So it's true," rasped an unfamiliar voice. In the glow of the fire, Alistair could see Zevran straddling a supine figure, his dagger held to the man's exposed neck. "When I heard you'd betrayed the Crows and gone soft, I didn't believe it. I had to see for myself."

"Now you have seen," Zevran answered coldly.

"It's not too late, Zevran. You can still come back with me. We'll make up a story."

"Let me guess, Rìona and I would have to be dead first, though," Alistair drawled.

"_That_is not going to happen," Zevran said adamantly. "Goodbye, old friend."

The hissing zing Zevran's blade made as it dragged across the man's throat was almost musical, and the assassin beneath Zevran died with barely a gurgle.

Zevran continued to kneel there, above the body, his head bowed. It took Alistair a moment to remember that Taliesen had been his lover, once.

"I'm sorry, Zev," he murmured belatedly.

"I... am not." Sighing, Zevran rose and moved to the window to close it and rearrange the armor beneath it. "Those others were not Crows, merely hired help. Not very skilled, I might add. With Taliesen dead, they have no reason to return. Come. Let us get these bodies outside, and then we may sleep again."

Shale's assistance made carrying the bodies out of the manor house easier; they could be taken to the pyres tomorrow. But the Harvestmere night was frigid and Alistair decided cleaning the blood off the stone floor could wait until morning as he built up the fire to dispel the chill from the large bedchamber.

Perhaps it was a good thing that all the rugs in the manor house had been taken by Howe or his men, he thought. Though, for that matter, with Howe dead, perhaps after they won Rìona's release, it might be time to re-confiscate some of the possessions which had rightfully belonged to the Couslands from _his_estate.

At least the bed-curtains were intact. Whichever senior member of Howe's forces that had occupied this estate had apparently liked his creature comforts well enough that the furniture and curtains in the lord's chamber hadn't been destroyed. Alistair left the side of the bed facing the hearth open to catch the warmth from the fire and closed the other sides—which also had the happy effect of blocking out the large pools of blood—and slid shivering under the bedclothes. Zevran was already there, the blankets pulled up to his ribs, his hands folded on his chest as he stared at the canopy with a distant look on his face.

"And so it is done. I am freed from the Crows."

Alistair rolled onto his side to face Zevran, folding his arm to pillow his head. "Will they send others after you?"

"Perhaps, someday. No doubt it will take them a while to discover I am still alive."

Alistair swallowed hard and forced himself to speak the question that had been plaguing him since Zevran had killed Taliesen. "You... initially you stayed with us for protection. But now... won't staying in one place endanger you?"

"Quite likely, yes."

"Staying with us could get you killed."

"True. But I am going nowhere." Slowly, Zevran turned his head to look at Alistair. There was something naked in his eyes. "You must forgive me, cariño. This is... difficult for me. With our Rìona, I need not be sincere. I can be flirty and charming and she sees through it and understands the words I cannot say. You, however, require honesty, and that is a much harder thing. But it is important that you know, as much as I feared for her, when the two of you were taken, I feared for you just as much."

Suddenly Alistair was the one without words, his throat closing with emotion. Of all that had happened since that night in the Deep Roads when he'd accosted Zevran in a frenzy of desperate need, this was the least expected. Falling in love with Rìona had been easy, almost inevitable. With Zevran, it was different.

As Alistair floundered, Zevran closed the distance between them, and kissed him with a deliberate tenderness that said what words could not.

It had been a struggle to come to this place. But perhaps, in some ways, it was all the better for the difficulty they'd had achieving it.


	57. Chapter Fifty Seven: Poles

Ella's urgent suckling dwindled to a more lazy pace, and Rìona switched breasts to relieve the ache on the other side. Only then did she force herself to recall the queen's presence.

"What is it you want of me, Your Majesty?" she asked, her voice ragged with the silent tears she had wept.

Anora appeared startled by the question. "Forgive me, Warden. Perhaps I ought to have offered you some privacy, but I find myself quite reluctantly fascinated. You're not what I thought you would be."

"And just what is it you thought I would be?"

Anora shrugged. "What would _you_ expect of a woman who plotted to steal your husband and your title?"

Rìona laughed softly at that. "That's a fair point, I suppose."

"I had anticipated a schemer, a master manipulator who dissembled as easily as she breathed. Instead, I find an hysterical girl uncouth enough to disregard the queen in order to attend to a hungry babe."

If Anora thought to embarrass her with that observation, it wasn't going to work. Rìona's relief was too great to care whether or not she had remembered to curtsy.

"Yes, well," she answered wryly, "this past year sleeping in the wilderness and fighting darkspawn has been a trying one. I'm sure I've forgotten many of my courtly graces. My mother would no doubt be appalled."

The queen was too polished a politician to look abashed at Rìona's pointed reminder that Anora had done little this last year to aid the realm. But Rìona found she had little interest in pursuing an examination of the queen's inactivity and ineffectuality, turning her attention once more to Ella.

"Why was she so hungry? Why is Muirne not with her?"

"Your wet-nurse is dead," Anora answered impassively. "She fell ill, and we couldn't risk that she might bring the Blight sickness, into the palace. My guard gave her a merciful death and took her to the pyres. I'm sorry. She seemed like a good and loyal servant."

"She was never exposed to the corruption!" Rìona glared at Anora in outrage. "You murdered a good woman out of hand for nothing."

The queen had the decency to bow her head. "It was not a decision I made lightly," she replied regretfully. "It was the safety of _your_ child I was thinking of when I made it. Perhaps that counts for something?"

"My child, whom you abducted in the first place?" Rìona snorted. "Had Muirne fallen ill in the arl's household, she would have been under the care of people who knew there was no way she could have contracted the Blight sickness, and with a healer of great power. Your assurances count for precious little, Your Majesty, when it is your doing that she is dead, no doubt of a simple cold that she could have recovered from easily."

Anora drew herself up with what might have been regal arrogance, save for the fact that she possessed the innate grace to make it appear unaffected. "I will not be questioned by you, Warden. You do not understand what has been happening here in Denerim while you have been fomenting rebellion across Ferelden. These are desperate times."

"What is it you want of me, Your Majesty?" Rìona asked tiredly. "What are your demands, in exchange for the return of my child?"

The queen blinked at that, recoiling slightly in astonishment. "You... you believe I've brought you here to blackmail you? That I would use your babe as a hostage?"

"That does seem to be the method preferred by your father's adherents, second to imprisonment and torture."

"You're speaking of Howe. Do not judge me by his standards."

"I've seen little reason to judge you differently, thus far."

"Howe was a vile man, and I've spent much of this last year attempting to combat his influence." The queen made a moue of distaste. "You did me a service when you killed him."

"A service for which you had me imprisoned while you abducted my child. You dare consider yourself any different?"

To Rìona's surprise, the queen smiled softly. "We seem to both be laboring under some misapprehensions of one another, Warden," she murmured, seating herself with casual grace. "I've assumed you to be conniving and underhanded, and you've assumed me to be vicious and bloodthirsty. Perhaps we might start again?"

So there it was, Rìona thought, blinking at the queen. The frank charm for which Anora had been frequently praised during her tenure as queen. She was not a warm woman, but she was not without her own appeal, nor without knowledge of how to use it.

One thing was certain. Nothing about this interview was happening as Rìona would have expected. 

* * *

Anora watched confusion chase across the face of her would-be rival.

"First of all, let me begin by apologizing for the loss of your family. Teyrna Eleanor was particularly dear to me, and I want you to know that, whatever horrible slander Howe tried to spread about her here at court, I always made a point of countering with the observation that she was one of the most gracious and kind women I'd ever met. I have no doubt Howe's twisted mind was behind her murder, rather than the uprising he claims his men fended off at Highever."

The Warden blinked, clearly surprised by Anora's condolences, but then her mouth drew into a tight line. "Howe was a coward. He would not have acted unless he was assured of protection from the consequences of his treason. Highever is the nearest major port to Orlais. If Loghain truly feared an invasion, he would have to secure it, and he wouldn't be able to do that unless my family was no longer an obstacle. Make no mistake: he knew. You may attempt to delude yourself, Your Majesty, but I'll not let you exonerate your father by shifting all the blame to Howe—who happens to be conveniently dead, in large part thanks to your deception."

Anora looked away for a moment. "Perhaps you're right. If my father sanctioned Howe's actions at Highever, however, he did so believing your family to be traitors. Perhaps that belief, too, had its origins in Howe's treachery, but you must admit my father may have had cause."

"_Indeed?_" The Warden's eyes narrowed angrily. "My father fought the Orlesians with every bit as much devotion to his homeland as yours did. My mother lost her entire family and fortune courtesy of Tarleton Howe's allegiance to Orlais. What cause to believe them traitors do you claim Loghain had, aside from Howe's poisonous lies?"

"Yet Teyrn Cousland argued passionately for years in favor of freer trade with Orlais in the Landsmeet, for a cessation of embargoes on Orlesian goods."

"Of course he did!" the Warden said shortly. "Free trade could only have benefited Ferelden! Loghain's isolationism was harming us both economically and diplomatically."

"I notice you don't deny open trade would have benefited Highever most of all," Anora observed with an ironic lift of her brow.

"Why should I?" the Warden shrugged. "Highever was the nearest major port to Orlais. Shipwrights, craftsmen, merchants, farmers... there isn't a freeholder or bann who looks to Highever who wouldn't have prospered from trade with Orlais. My father had a duty as their liege lord to seek that prosperity on their behalf. But there was far more trade than Highever Port could have handled alone. Amaranthine and Denerim would also have seen their share of profits. And surely I need not remind you that Gwaren is a port city as well?"

"My father claimed it would have posed a security risk. That opening Ferelden's ports to Orlesian trade would only have made the empire greedy for more."

"And my father countered that. He claimed that the Orlesian nobility might have been placated, if they had heard the sound of Fereldan sovereigns jingling in their purses, and Ferelden would no longer have appeared to be the ripe, unattainable fruit on the highest vine, begging to be plucked." The Warden looked down, a wave of tenderness crossing her face as she promptly forgot to continue her argument in order to stare at the sleeping infant she held.

Anora felt very much the intruder, seeing that soft look. She glanced away as the Warden tenderly moved the babe up to her shoulder and fumbled to tuck her breast back into her bodice with one hand. The young mother placed her face against the babe's golden curls and inhaled deeply, closing her eyes with a strange sort of rapture.

Anora felt a wave of envy she could not entirely suppress. Once, she had thought she might like a child of her own. But that had been before the prospect of enjoying motherhood for its own sake had been tarnished by duty and obligation and failure, leaving her apathetic and nearly repulsed by it all.

She hated the Warden, a little, for having that joy.

Eventually, the Warden remembered herself, and in a more sedate tone, concluded, "Closing Ferelden off from Orlesian trade made us a prize to be coveted, and conquered if possible. And it has injured us diplomatically. Now, when we desperately need allies, we have none. Your father's paranoia has crippled us."

"My father loves his country!"

"He loves her too jealously." The Warden offered Anora a poignant smile. "He's the obsessed husband who would suffocate his wife with a pillow, rather than see her in the arms of a lover."

Anora found herself giving the Warden a sardonic look. "It's not without its element of irony that you should make that particular observation to me. When Cailan sent diplomatic delegations to Empress Celene, your father led them." It was an effort, not to let her humiliation show, but she forced herself to speak the galling truth. "And when Celene began hinting of an alliance between Ferelden and Orlais by marriage between her and Cailan, it was your father who carried the missive."

The Warden's brows lifted, though her voice was calm as she asked, "You knew of that?"

"A piece of correspondence never crossed Cailan's desk that I didn't read," Anora replied disdainfully, seeking refuge in her pride at her own competence. "I was the one who ruled this nation, on his behalf, all the years of our marriage. Of course I knew of it."

"Then you know Cailan was determined to refuse her."

Bitter. Ah, Maker, so bitter, to reveal these truths to this woman. "Yes, he was. After _I_ made it clear to him that the Landsmeet would never stand for such a thing."

She didn't tell the Warden how deeply painful it had been, to find herself forced to argue for her marriage with a man whose short attention span was already leading him to forget the affection he bore for Anora, too easily tempted by the prospect of novelty. Cailan had preened like a peacock at the idea of bedding a woman who styled herself an _empress,_ and he'd thought it grand, at first, that he might call himself an emperor.

Nor did Anora admit how infuriating it had been, to see Cailan willing to disregard all she had accomplished as his queen for no better reason than her unproductive womb. The Warden didn't need to know how Anora had forced emotion aside to strike a bargain with Cailan. Three more years, and if there was no heir at the end of that time, Anora wouldn't protest an annulment. She would even use her own keen political sense to help Cailan choose a new bride, and stay on as chancellor to help him rule the realm. She'd been forced to haggle to keep the title that was rightfully hers, the title she'd spent her whole life grooming herself to bear.

Ironically enough, Rìona Cousland would have been near the top of Anora's list of prospective brides for Cailan, had those three years passed fruitlessly, and if the girl had still been unwed and biddable enough to pose no threat to Anora's continued influence as chancellor. The Couslands were, after all, powerful allies.

But in the end, in the final degradation, Cailan hadn't had the honor to keep to their agreement. Instead, he had chosen his next bride precipitously, by offering marriage to the woman before her.

Those wounds and humiliations weren't for the ears of this astonishingly guileless girl.

Nonetheless, Anora found herself confessing something she hadn't intended to admit. "By then, I had already confided the matter of Empress Celene's designs to my father. You will never know how deeply I regret that impulse. Sometimes I fear it was not Howe and his lies who pushed my father into madness, but me." 

* * *

There was something in the queen's eyes, a shadow of shame and pain, that slew the words of censure that had risen readily to Rìona's lips. It stirred within her breast an unwilling touch of sympathy to mingle with her hatred of the woman who had taken her child.

The queen was not what Rìona had expected her to be.

"Then you admit Loghain is mad?" she asked instead, her voice carefully neutral.

The queen looked away for a moment, then met Rìona's eyes candidly. "Yes. I didn't, at first. You must understand, I believed him, when he told me what happened at Ostagar. Despite everything, I... cared for Cailan. It was a relief, to accept my father's aid when he assumed the regency. I thought he was doing it out of kindness, so that the realm might continue to fight the threats it faced effectively while I grieved. Perhaps I let my mourning blind me to what was happening, but by the time I saw what was going on, Howe was entrenched here in Denerim and my father was conducting war against my people rather than combating the Blight."

"So your people have suffered while you indulged yourself?" Rìona watched the queen bristle at the accusation. She felt the anger that had been welling within her since her first visit to Denerim pushing to the fore. "You have hidden here in the palace. You have not been out in the streets. You have not seen what Howe's thugs have done to the people of this very city. Not in far corners of the realm, but on your very doorstep! While you have been wringing your hands and making impotent pleas for the bannorn to meekly accept your father's atrocities, complete lawlessness has taken root in this city, overseen by the man whose stewardship _you_ were charged with overseeing."

"You have the audacity to judge me!" The queen surged to her feet. "You, who have done much this last year to destabilize the realm?"

"Should I have allowed myself to be branded a traitor and put to death for your father's crime, instead?" Rìona asked hotly. "Truly, Your Majesty, what is it I have done to foment instability, save counter the lies of a mad would-be tyrant?"

The queen's eyes dropped to the babe sleeping on Rìona's shoulder, and her face hardened.

"My father was under the impression that you were an emissary of Empress Celene, that you were at Ostagar with the intention of securing a betrothal between her and Cailan, at which point the Orlesian forces she promised to aid us would enter the country. I nearly believed it, myself, until I saw Cailan's documents."

Again, there was that flash of humiliation in the queen's eyes, quickly sublimated behind her regal mask. "It was a bitter moment, to realize I had been betrayed by father and husband both on the same day. When I saw that Cailan had intended to wed you, I knew my father had lied about what the Grey Wardens had done at Ostagar, for surely you would not have been the instrument of Cailan's death when he was poised to make you his queen. Still, the point remains. Do you deny you went to Ostagar with the intent of supplanting me?"

Rìona drew a deep breath and released it slowly. "No, I do not. Perhaps I wronged you, Your Majesty, and if so, I apologize. I cannot pretend there was no vanity or ambition involved, but at the heart of it all was duty. Your father's influence over the king was harming Ferelden. Someone needed to weaken his grasp on Cailan, and to do that, the connection by marriage needed to be severed and an estrangement created."

"That is all well and good," the queen answered stiffly. "Maker help me, I can perhaps see your point, even if I don't necessarily agree with it. But once Cailan was gone, you still plotted with Eamon to take my throne from me, using Cailan's heir. Did Eamon promise you a seat on the regency council, or is he to be sole regent?"

Rìona blinked slowly, stunned into speechlessness for a moment. The queen didn't know about Alistair, or had disregarded him as potential competition for her throne. Somehow, Rìona hadn't expected such a thing, that Anora would consider _Ella_ to be her primary rival.

Suddenly, the queen's possible reasons for seizing custody of the babe became much more chilling.

Should Rìona tell Anora about Alistair's bid for the throne? Would she be placing Alistair in even more danger, if she did so? He was alone in Fort Drakon, defenseless, if the queen should decide to eliminate him.

Surely Anora couldn't possibly be thinking of killing Ella, not if she'd gone to the trouble to bring Rìona here from Fort Drakon to feed the babe when hungry.

What, then, could her motive be?

Carefully, Rìona replied, "I assure you, Your Majesty, I have no designs on the regency. Nor, to my knowledge, does Arl Eamon."

"You expect me to believe that?" the queen scoffed. "Why else would you have brought the child to Denerim?"

"Can you truly not comprehend? She's my child. I am her mother. I am also a Grey Warden, and there is a Blight ravaging the land. Should I have left her far away, where I could not have been assured of her safety? How could I possibly attend to my duties, worried out of my head for her well-being?"

"And so you brought her all the way across Ferelden, where she might have been exposed to the Blight sickness, or Maker knows what else?"

"Not all of us have the luxury of quarantining ourselves in a palace, Your Majesty."

"No." The queen shook her head. "I believe you had other designs, and your ready condemnation of my rule clearly indicates you wish to depose me, even with Cailan gone. What else should I believe, but that you intend to use the babe as a pawn against me?"

"Believe what you wish, but I've spoken naught but the truth," Rìona replied tiredly. "And so we come full circle. Why am I here, Your Majesty? Why have you taken Ella? If you do not wish to use her to blackmail concessions from me, I can't fathom your purpose."

Anora stared for a long, calculating moment, and when she spoke, her voice was bemused. "I could almost believe you're as candid as you pretend to be, but for the fact that something doesn't add up here. Eamon's playing some game I haven't quite yet figured out. He's too invested in maintaining his connection to the throne to support my rule without Cailan. He—"

Rìona strove to keep her expression utterly blank as the queen's voice trailed off, but it was too late.

"Unless Eamon's puppet is to be another bastard heir entirely. Alistair. I'd nearly forgotten him in all this, so intent was I upon the babe. I thought surely Eamon would prefer to have a blood connection to the throne, rather than merely a connection via fosterage. It doesn't make sense... unless the child is to be Alistair's heir. With you as his queen, naturally. Yes, of course." Anora shook her head, a quizzical smile playing on her lips. "Well played, Warden. You almost had me convinced. These Theirin men are always happiest with a pretty woman to dote upon, aren't they?"

"Your tacit complicity in your father's actions has left us little choice," Rìona answered calmly. "We must end this civil war and unite Ferelden against the Blight."

"On that we can both agree, but I find your methods of doing so a trifle self-serving."

"Think what you like about my methods, but I've been out there this past year, struggling against the Blight at great personal cost, while you've been sheltered here in the palace. How many hundreds of your own subjects have died, Your Majesty, while you've stood by?"

Anora's eyes grew colder. "I agree my father must be stopped. But once he is, Ferelden will need strong leadership, from a proven ruler, not a green lad and an over-ambitious girl."

"Ferelden can't trust you, Your Majesty. You've betrayed us all with your complaisance," Rìona responded mercilessly. "Loghain's styling himself king. He has a crown he intends to wear to the Landsmeet. Tell me truly, Your Majesty, is it the people you're thinking of, when you say your father must be stopped—the people who, I will add, you've done nothing to aid this past year—or the fact that you see your own power has been eroded? And you have the gall to accuse me of being self-serving!"

"You believe you and Maric's untried bastard could do better?"

"I believe it would be very difficult to do worse. 'How you treat the least will be remembered by the greatest.' It's the moral of a fable my Nan used to tell me. The least of your people have suffered terribly, this past year, and you have allowed it. You should have been the first to rise up against your father in protest. Perhaps you delayed out of filial loyalty, or perhaps you simply wanted to cling to what claim to authority you still possessed. Either way, you've become so entrenched in politics that you've forgotten your duty to the common folk of Ferelden. But this is a matter for the Landsmeet to decide. Either way, I'm taking my babe and leaving."

Anora gave Rìona a withering look. "You are free to leave, but the princess shall remain. No doubt we'll find a suitable wet nurse sooner or later. The only reason you were brought here in the first place was because we dared not expose her to a filthy refugee. If there were a nanny goat within fifty miles of Denerim that hadn't already been slaughtered for food, you'd still be in Fort Drakon."

"You're mad if you think I'll permit such a thing!"

"Then it's all very well I've not asked for your permission, isn't it?" the queen responded caustically. "This child poses a threat to my rule and to my heirs after me, so long as bigoted fools like Eamon Guerrin insist that royal blood is the only qualification an heir to the throne requires. And so I will take your pawn and add her to my side of the board."

Rìona felt panic begin to tighten her chest. "You cannot do such a thing. This is _my_ child. She's not a pawn in some game! You have no grounds for any such action!"

"There you are mistaken. I have a document, the last one ever written by my husband, naming this babe as his heir. Whatever agreements existed between you and Cailan are irrelevant. They ended with his death, but the bequest to the child must be honored. I would be less than a dutiful queen if I neglected his wishes and left her in the custody of a condemned traitor. You will be permitted to tend the princess as her wet nurse, until a suitable replacement can be found. But there will be a full two dozen of the royal guard posted outside these chambers and between you and every exit from the palace, however. Do not think to abduct Princess Celia and escape."

"_Ella!_ Her name is Caila Eleanor Cousland!"

The queen shrugged. "Yes, well, we shall have a proper Naming for her after the Landsmeet."

Rìona struggled against the burning in her eyes, fought not to dissolve into hopeless hysterics at the thought of this woman taking her child from her permanently. "You will have to kill me before I allow this to happen."

"You're a traitor and a murderess. No one will think twice if you are slain by the royal guard breaking into the palace to abduct the royal heir." The queen's face was cold and shuttered, leaving Rìona without any hope that she might actually be bluffing. "If you had proven more reasonable and willing to be supportive of my rule, I was prepared to offer you better terms. I would have offered to allow you to claim the babe was born to another women you knew from Ostagar, someone who died in childbirth, and that you brought her to Denerim to claim her birthright. It would have spared you the ignominy of everyone knowing you bore a bastard child whom you were found unfit to raise. But clearly that's not going to be possible. Be grateful you have a chance to say farewell."

The queen swept from the chamber before Rìona could muster another argument. 

* * *

She had not expected this. Nothing Anora could have imagined had prepared her for the possibility that the Warden truly loved her child.

The flash of tears in the Warden's eyes nearly weakened Anora's resolve. But she had not succeeded as queen by being sentimental. The last time she had allowed emotion to overrule her good sense, her father had provoked a civil war. It would not happen again. Cailan's child would do nothing but create instability in the realm, for there would always be those who wanted a Theirin on the throne, so long as the bloodline persisted. What good would it do her, to pull the realm back from the brink of disaster, if threat of another civil war hovered ever on the horizon?

And yet, she no longer had the sense of rightness in her purpose that she'd possessed before. When she had imagined the babe to be the Warden and Eamon's pawn, it had been simple. Now, it was not.

She faced her father impassively over supper. They observed the courtesy of dining together, but rarely spoke these days. She could not bring herself to converse with him, since she had resolved to betray him and take back her throne. They might have been allies, if he had brought her in on his plans, but instead he had lied and conspired to take her power from her, and that she would not allow. Sometimes she thought his conscience troubled him, and well it should. Anora had been appalled when she learned what had happened to Bann Grainne, and the hunters from Oswin. And yet she dared say nothing; she could not risk that he would come to perceive her as a threat. In his mad paranoia, she could not be certain what he would do.

He surprised her, tonight, by being the first to speak.

"Teyrn Howe is dead."

Anora dropped her eyes, as though she weren't already aware of this revelation. He thought her without eyes and ears, here in the palace. He did not think she bothered to keep herself informed. He, who had raised her, should know better.

"I am sorry to hear it, Father. I know you valued him as an ally."

"Cauthrien tells me it was you who advised her to check on him, the day he was killed."

"I did but express my concern, when rumor reached me that these Grey Wardens had threatened Teyrn Howe. Perhaps I should have done so earlier. It may have saved his life."

She said nothing of the fact that this action effectively got his most trusted lieutenant and men away from the palace, so that Anora might go to Arl Eamon's estate to seize custody of the Warden's child with none of her father's people being aware of it. Only the royal guard knew, and they were loyal to her. So far as Loghain was aware, the Warden did not have a child, much less that the babe was housed here in the palace in a distant wing he would never have cause to visit.

Loghain thought threats only came from outside the palace. He would never think to suspect intrigue from within.

"Yes, well, you should be glad to know that, acting on your advice, she managed to capture both of the Grey Wardens. They are now in Fort Drakon, awaiting sentencing for their crimes."

Anora offered him a dutiful smile. "Then I am pleased I thought to express my concern to her. Surely this is a great relief to you."

"Once the Landsmeet learns what they have done, perhaps we can finally end this ridiculous rebellion and turn our attention to the true threats to our land," her father declared, ripping into a loaf of bread.

Anora sipped her wine and kept her expression sedate. "Maker will it shall be so, Father."


	58. Chapter Fifty Eight: Negotiations

"I'm sorry, Alistair," Arl Eamon sighed. "There is nothing I can do."

"She can't possibly have grounds for this."

"She can and she does," the arl replied stiffly. "Until the Landsmeet overturns Loghain's claims to the regency, true or not, the Warden is a condemned traitor, one who did murder Arl Howe in his own home. The character of the person who oversees the upbringing of the royal heir is a pertinent consideration. Anora may very well have a legitimate claim on those grounds."

"But Ella isn't her child!" Alistair protested, pacing agitatedly. "Cailan meant _Rìona_to be the queen. He never made any provision for turning over any child Rìona might bear him to another custodian."

"Whatever agreements may or may not have existed between Cailan and the Warden were rendered null and void by his death. Yes, the document might have strengthened your claim to the throne and given you an advantage over Anora, if you had named the babe your heir and presented the act of wedding Lady Cousland as honoring the final wish of your brother. But Anora has changed the rules of the game on us, by acknowledging the babe's paternity herself rather than waiting for us to use it against her."

"What do you mean?"

"Now _she_is going to be seen as the one honoring Cailan's wishes, by adopting his bastard child and raising it as her own, the child of a rival meant to depose her, no less. It will be seen as dutiful to the point of utter selflessness, and it will remove from Anora's continued reign any pressure to produce an heir," Eamon lectured. "Whether Anora is barren or not, or whether she is of royal blood or not, will cease to matter, with the continuation of the Theirin dynasty assured in the form of the princess. This is particularly true if Anora decides to stand against Loghain. She will be seen as putting the best interests of the realm above personal interest, filial loyalty, and even her own public embarrassment. She's accepting the indignity of tacitly admitting to being barren, in a gambit that will all but guarantee her widespread support. To tell the truth... I'm no longer certain we can succeed in deposing her. We may have no choice but to support her claim to the throne."

"_What?_" Outraged, Alistair stopped his pacing to turn upon the arl. "After the way she led us into a trap, you can't possibly support her!"

"If she adopts the babe and makes the child her heir, your claim to the throne won't stand. The babe is Cailan's direct descendent, acknowledged not only by Cailan's final wishes but also by his widow. And forgive me, but you were not acknowledged; your legitimacy is far more in question than the child's. But more importantly, Anora's positioning herself against Loghain. With your claim to the throne weakened, perhaps irreparably so, we have two choices. We can ally ourselves with Anora, or with Loghain. Clearly, the latter isn't an option."

"There must be another way! If we can get the document back—!"

"Even if we could, she has trumped us. Even if we had the document and tried to use it to bolster your claim to the throne, hers is still stronger. We must work with her, Alistair, to bring down Loghain. It's our only hope for success, now."

Alistair gave the arl a bitter look. "It's all the same to you, isn't it?" he asked, shaking his head. "In fact, you prefer it this way. You get a stronger connection to the throne, like this, without the inconvenience of dealing with a puppet-king who just happens to refuse to be anyone's puppet."

"I'm trying to do what is best for Ferelden, Alistair," Arl Eamon said repressively. " As are we all. Cheer up, lad. You made it clear to me that you never really wanted to be king, anyway. This works out better for all concerned."

"Except for Rìona, whose child is being taken from her."

The arl shook his head regretfully. "The Warden would have had to foster the babe, anyway, if she'd hoped to carry out her duties as a Grey Warden. And if she's willing to put sentiment above duty, then perhaps it's best that she isn't queen. Still, if it's that big a concern for you, go to Anora. Offer her the support of the Grey Wardens against Loghain. Perhaps she'll be willing to make some concessions with regards to fosterage of the royal heir, if she knows the Wardens aren't her rivals."

Alistair was already striding from the arl's study before Eamon offered him a dismissive nod.

* * *

"_Concessions!_" Alistair sneered the word. Zevran's eyes followed him as he stormed restlessly around their bedchamber at the Cousland estate. "After what that woman has done, I'm supposed to go to her and beg her to allow us to have our daughter back?"

"There is always my solution," Zevran said, pitching his voice low. Under the mask he wore over his mouth and nose, it came out strangely muffled. He turned his attention back to the dagger from whose blade he was carefully scraping flakes of dried, black blood onto a piece of parchment with the blade of another dagger.

"We're not going to assassinate the queen," Alistair growled, then paused, noticing Zevran for the first time since he had stormed into the bedchamber. "What _are_you doing?"

"I, ah, forgot to clean my spare dagger, after the last time I used it," Zevran answered with a careless shrug. "It has been in its sheath all this time."

"Is that darkspawn blood? Maker's balls, let me do that!" Alistair snapped, reaching for the blade. "There's a reason Rìona and I insist on being the ones to clean all the bladed weapons after a fight with darkspawn, you know!"

"Thank you, but I am almost finished." Zevran held up a leather-gloved hand. "As you can see, I have been most careful not to cut myself, and I have covered my face so I do not inhale the flakes. I felt it was safer to scrape off the dried blood, than to make it wet again and try to wipe it off. I shall throw all this on the fire when I am done, I assure you. So tell me, what is it you plan to do, when you go to see this queen of yours, if killing her is not an option?"

"She's not _my_queen." Alistair resumed his angry, caged pacing. Carefully, Zevran folded the parchment into a tight packet, trapping the flakes of dried darkspawn blood inside where they posed no threat of exposing anyone to the corruption, and then took an oiled rag to the blade of the dagger to clean off the last traces.

"I have no idea what I'm supposed to do," Alistair admitted. "Offer her our unstinting support and pray she has an ounce of humanity inside her, I guess."

"And if she does not?"

"Threaten to make things difficult for her, I suppose. Maybe my claim to the throne can't win out against hers, but I can make the process of her confirmation as queen a lot messier, if I choose to. Slow everything down. Hopefully she'll see the value of a quick and neat resolution to all of this."

"_And if she does not?_"

Alistair turned to Zevran with a grim smile as the embers on the hearth flared, consuming the parchment Zevran threw upon them.

"If she doesn't... I guess there's always your solution, Maker help us all. One way or the other, I'm not leaving the palace without both of them."

* * *

Alistair wore the Warden-Commander armor to the palace, rather than Cailan's. It wouldn't do to be perceived as a threat to Anora's rule, after all.

Less than two weeks in Denerim, and he was already learning far more than he ever wanted about perception and appearances.

Zevran had wanted to go with him, posing as Alistair's manservant, but Alistair wasn't entirely certain he trusted Zev not to take matters into his own hands. He had backed down from the murderous rage he'd exhibited the night he'd broken Alistair out of Fort Drakon, but his eyes grew frighteningly empty every time he was reminded of Rìona and Ella's absence.

Instead, Alistair permitted Zevran and Sten to accompany him only as far as the palace gates, and then only because Zevran wouldn't allow any other compromise. He still feared bounty hunters and assassins might make another attempt upon Alistair. Thankfully, the Cousland manor wasn't far from the palace district. They couldn't hire a livery, because horses were scarce in Denerim these days. With half the Bannorn's crops corrupted by the Blight, and the other half cut off from being delivered to Denerim by darkspawn along the roads, famine was already sinking its savage claws into the city. Livestock was running scarce, the fishing boats in Denerim harbor were unable to keep up with demand, and people were beginning to slaughter their horses for meat.

As he waited in an audience chamber for the queen, Alistair blessed the foresight with which Zevran and Leliana had raided the food stores of the Arl of Denerim's now-empty estate, while Alistair was in Fort Drakon and Wynne had been overseeing the exodus to the Cousland manor. Their party would be able to survive several weeks on just a fraction of all the smoked meats and aged cheeses they had scavenged from the hoard Howe had stashed away, to feed himself and his elite guard while the people of Denerim were beginning to starve.

The queen appeared startled, if only for the briefest moment, when she walked briskly into the chamber to greet him. Behind her hovered her elven maidservant, the one who had come to Eamon's estate with the false report that Rìona's brother was being held in Howe's dungeons. She was also accompanied by a full dozen guards, all of whom watched Alistair as though he posed more threat than the entire darkspawn horde.

"Your Majesty," Alistair bowed. He knew nothing of courtly etiquette, and so he settled for a military bow, the sort he'd been taught to offer the full-fledged knights at the monastery. The queen didn't seem to mind, thankfully, and he straightened quickly. "Thank you for seeing me."

"Alistair." She spoke his name as though she knew him already, for all that they had never met.

"You know who I am?"

"Cailan spoke of you, once or twice." The queen gave him a frank perusal. "And even if he hadn't, the resemblance..."

"Yes, so I'm told." He couldn't help the bitterness that crept into his words.

"You take a great risk, coming to the palace" Anora remarked, collecting herself easily. Alistair decided he didn't like her. She was too unaffected, her voice too measured, her diction too perfect. It was as though every word, even the slightest movement, was weighed carefully before she spoke or acted. She had none of Rìona's gentle warmth. "I could have you arrested again. Many lives were lost, at Howe's estate and when you broke out of Fort Drakon. You're a murderer many times over."

"That explains the guards then," Alistair replied, nodding to the men spread out in formation flanking the queen. "I wouldn't call putting down mad dogs murder, and that's what Howe and his men were. And seeing as we were at Howe's estate and Fort Drakon in the most part thanks to _you_, I'd say at least some of the fault for those deaths lies on your head, wouldn't you? You didn't scruple over the loss of lives when you baited your trap." She looked indignant at that, but Alistair waved it aside before she could protest. "Let them arrest me, if they want to try. If I wished to play the fugitive and hide, I could. Obviously, I'm not."

The captain of the guard stepped forward, gripping the hilt of the sword that rode at his waist, but the queen raised a forestalling hand.

"Tell me, is it something about being a Grey Warden that fosters such impolitic candor?"

Caught off-balance by the slight undercurrent of amusement in her voice, Alistair shrugged. "You try traveling back and forth across Ferelden trying to gather an army and sleeping in caves for a year, while being hunted for a crime you didn't commit, and see how much patience you have for chit-chat and double-talk."

"Perhaps I've been at court too long," the queen mused. "I've grown unaccustomed to hearing candor from anyone save my father, and even that's been scarce of late."

"Then Arl Eamon was right. You're planning to contest Loghain's claim to the regency."

She gave him an impatient, almost disdainful look. "What I am _planning_is to unite this country and turn our attention from fighting one another to fighting the Blight. To do that, I need to be certain my authority is undisputed. If that means I must challenge my father, then I will."

"Coming a bit late to the party, aren't you?" The moment the words were out of his mouth, Alistair regretted them. Not that they weren't true, but he didn't imagine insulting the queen was the best way to go about petitioning her to return custody of Ella to them. "I apologize, Your Majesty. That was... out of line. That's not why I came here."

"And what is it you've come here for?" Anora demanded, an edge of irritation creeping into her voice.

"I've come to ask you not to assert custody over my niece. Give her back to her mother and send her home."

The queen blinked slowly. "Well, that is... forthright. Lady Cousland is free to leave, of course, as soon as we find a suitable wet nurse for the babe. As for Cailan's child, I'm afraid it's a bit more complex."

Alistair drew a deep breath. "Not if I offer you the support of the Grey Wardens when you oppose Loghain."

"And why would you do that?"

"Why wouldn't I?" Alistair shrugged. "Putting me forward to contest your claim to the throne was Arl Eamon's idea. I never wanted it. The only thing I'm concerned with is stopping Loghain so we can get on with the business of ending the Blight, and the only reason I agreed to Eamon's plan was because I didn't think you'd turn on your father. But if you're willing to do that, and rescind the accusation of treason against the Grey Wardens, then not only will I _not_oppose your claim to the throne, I will promise you our complete support."

"You speak for Lady Cousland as well?" The queen lifted her brows questioningly. "Your fellow Warden has, after all, been most adamant in her disapproval of the way I have dealt with my father and the politics of the realm this last year."

"She doesn't have to approve. If given a choice between endorsing you before the Landsmeet and losing Ella, then yes, I think I can say with a fair degree of confidence which one she'll pick."

"And what is to keep her—or you, for that matter—from changing your minds, if I agree? Once the child is out of my custody, you can claim whatever you like, once more."

"Why would she? The second she claims Ella is Cailan's offspring, she validates your claim to custody. And she won't do that."

"Are you certain?"

"Absolutely."

"What makes you so sure?"

Alistair blinked at the queen, his brow wrinkling in confusion. "Ella is her _child._"

Anora looked away at that, frowning. "Perhaps you're right. Certainly, my own impression is that Lady Cousland's purpose in bringing the babe to Denerim may not have been as calculating as I originally assumed. And yet ambition can do strange things to people. It may override maternal sentiment, if an opportunity presents itself. If I don't take custody of the babe, she will ever be a blade aimed at my back."

"Destroy the letter," Alistair urged adamantly, finding himself dangerously near to begging. "Without it, there's no proof, even if Rìona wanted to claim Cailan was Ella's father. She won't, but if that's what it takes to make you feel secure, go ahead and do it."

The queen shook her head. "Without the document, I have no support for my claim of custody, either. I'm sorry. With an heir assured, so is my reign. I can begin working on undoing some of the damage my father's madness and Howe's vile influence has done to this realm this past year. Even if you or Lady Cousland support my claim to the throne, the same cannot be said for any other hidebound schemer like Eamon Guerrin, someone who wants a Theirin heir for the throne. There will always be someone who desires to raise up this child in my place. I cannot take that chance. I will not sacrifice a lifetime of preparation and training and effort. I will not let all I have worked for go to waste."

It came to him in a moment of desperate clarity, what he must do. He felt sick at the realization, and yet he could see no other way.

"If you need a Theirin to solidify your claim to the throne, then let it be me." His jaw ached with tension as he forced himself to make the offer. "That should placate anyone who wants to challenge your rule. Just... let Rìona keep her babe."

"You?" For the first time, the queen's imperturbable mask dropped. She looked astonished. Then her face grew cold and stony once more. "That would suit Eamon fine, I'm sure. Perhaps too fine. It may be I've misjudged your own lack of ambition."

"You think I'm after the bloody throne?" Alistair demanded furiously, prompting the guards to grip their sword-hilts again. "Believe me when I say that is the _last_ thing I want, and you're the last woman in Thedas I would willingly marry. But you've lost a husband this year." He jabbed an irate finger at the door leading from the audience chamber. "_She_ has lost everything. _Everything!_Her family was murdered, even down to her six-year-old nephew. She's been accused of treason and her family name dragged through the mud. Everything she had to claim in this world has been taken from her. Ella is all she has left."

He turned from her, pulling his helpless anger back with a shudder.

"I'm begging you. Don't take her babe from her, too."

* * *

He hadn't thought his plea would work, at first. Really, on a practical level, keeping custody of Ella was still more advantageous to Anora than marrying him. But after a long moment, the queen relented, compelled by simple human mercy, something he'd doubted her capable of feeling.

Though he knew she was being devoured by curiosity, Rìona respected his request not to ask any questions, once Anora's maidservant fetched her and Alistair escorted her from the palace. Erlina produced a borrowed cloak for Rìona to bundle Ella within, and then they walked away from the palace together, collecting Zevran and Sten outside the gates.

Alistair felt ill, unable to stop thinking of what he had done, what he had committed himself to. His chest was unbearably tight, as though he couldn't draw a deep enough breath. His stomach churned queasily. He would need to explain himself, and soon. Zevran and Rìona were both giving him _looks,_their eyes full of concern.

He had to tell them, but first he just wanted to get Rìona and the babe to safety.

Rìona was struck silent, appalled by the condition of her family's manor house. Clearly, the damage wrought by Howe's people was worse than she had expected. But her dismay was quickly set aside in her relief at being away from the palace with Ella in her arms. Alistair and Zevran escorted her to the lord's chambers, where she sat in a chair before the hearth and nursed the babe.

Alistair watched them from the doorway. Zevran, usually so perceptive, was focused on Rìona almost completely, his relief at having her safely back a near palpable thing. He crouched beside her chair, lightly touching Ella's curls and murmuring inquiries and reassurances to Rìona. Alistair's throat began to tighten, and he slipped away as quietly as he could, fleeing to an empty bedchamber.

A family. His family. That was what they had become. The one thing he'd always wanted most in the world, the thing he'd sought all his life. They were not at all what he had ever expected, Rìona and Zev and Ella, when he'd imagined having a family.

They were better. Perfect. More than he could have dreamed.

But they weren't his, any longer. Nor was he theirs. Come the Landsmeet, he would have to give them up entirely, or ask them to endure the degradation of being nothing more than concubines. If not for Ella, perhaps he could have been content to do that. But she deserved more, than to be the bastard child of the king's mistress.

One thing was certain, he could never expect to have such a thing with Anora. That had been made abundantly clear when she coldly laid down for him what she would expect from him, as king. Dutiful visits to her bed to try to get an heir, certainly. But they would not be partners, not as he and Rìona had become, and they certainly wouldn't be family.

For a few brief, shining months, he'd had a taste of the one thing he'd always longed for. But after the Landsmeet, he would be alone.

"_Cariño?_"

Alistair cleared his throat. "I need a moment, Zev, if that's all right. I'll be along."

"Are you well?"

"Yes. No. We'll have to talk, the three of us, once Ella's asleep. Just, please... go."

"As you wish."

The door to the chamber clicked shut behind him, and he was alone again before a single strangled sob tried to rise up in his throat to choke him. Impatiently, he scrubbed at his wet face, and when he felt he had himself under control, he turned to join them again, and confess to them what he had done.


	59. Chapter Fifty Nine: Sacrifices

"Riordan. Welcome. Make yourself... comfortable." Rìona gestured around the scarred and barren parlor of the once-elegant manor house that had been her family's Denerim home.

"Thank you, sister." The Orlesian Grey Warden bowed his head politely. "Alistair is not here with you?"

"No. He and the rest of our companions are investigating a situation in the Alienage that the queen—" she almost, _almost_ managed not to give the word a snide emphasis, "—asked them to look into. It may yield us more ammunition to use against Loghain when we confront him."

"Yes, the Landsmeet is only two days away, as I understand it?" Rìona nodded, dropping her eyes. "I am surprised you have not gone with them."

With a wry smile, Rìona gestured to the makeshift bassinet that stood a safe distance from the hearth. "Until we can find a suitable wet nurse, I'm afraid I can't venture far. Arl Bryland sent notice today that his housekeeper's sister has just had a babe, however. She will be coming later today to join our household, we hope."

"You have a child?" the senior Warden asked, his voice sharp with surprise and disapproval, and Rìona found herself bristling. "That is... most unexpected."

"For me also, I assure you," Rìona answered, annoyance lending a tart edge to her words. "I am given to understand that Grey Wardens are generally thought incapable of having children. It's possible I conceived Ella before my Joining, however."

Riordan shook his head. "It is more than that. There are reasons, sister, why we leave our lives and our families behind when we join the Grey Wardens. The duty we carry, it is a heavy one that demands great sacrifice. To... complicate that, by involving husbands and wives and children... it is not something we do."

"So Duncan told me, back at Ostagar before he died." Rìona surprised herself with the surge of bitterness that memory still invoked. "For my part, I think perhaps you've all buried yourselves under talk of the crushing burden of duty and obligation for so long, you've forgotten basic concepts like simple compassion. If not to make the world a safe place where we may nurture the children we love, what does this duty matter? Sacrifice for the anonymous masses is a grand and noble ideal in the abstract, but that babe sleeping there is the reality. She's what I fight for."

The senior Warden frowned at her, and Rìona stared back coolly, as though daring him to give her cause to vent some of her futile rage. She would not tolerate his speaking to her as though she and Alistair knew nothing of sacrifice, not after what Alistair had—

Rìona dropped her gaze, forcing herself to relinquish that thought.

"What is it that brings you here, Riordan?" Rìona asked hollowly after a moment.

"I have retrieved some items from a Grey Warden cache here in Denerim, which I thought might be of use to you and Alistair. I understand you were not very well equipped, after Ostagar. That you managed to get as far as you have speaks well of your resourcefulness. Still, perhaps there is something that might be of use to you."

Rìona nodded, not terribly interested in what he had brought. "Well, thank you, that's... very thoughtful of you."

She was being sullen, she knew. It was really quite absurd, how saturnine she'd become since the night Highever had fallen. She didn't recall ever having been so prone to brooding before. The girl she had been back then seemed like another person entirely, though.

Riordan fixed her with those sober gray eyes. "I assume you and Alistair have decided that he should be the one to deal the deathblow to the archdemon, should it come to that?"

Rìona shrugged. "I rather think we need to find the archdemon first." Riordan's gaze sharpened again, making Rìona feel as though she had said something wrong. "What?"

"_Merde,_" Riordan murmured beneath his breath. "Duncan did not tell you how it is the Grey Wardens defeat the archdemon."

"I was a Grey Warden for less than a day before Duncan died," Rìona replied a bit stiffly, unease shivering down her spine. "There is much Duncan did not deign to tell me in advance."

"And Alistair does not know either, I assume, or surely he would have told you."

"Told me what, exactly?"

Riordan sighed, as though struggling with a terrible burden. "Forgive me. This is not news I would wish to trouble a young mother with. When I say that being a Grey Warden calls upon us to make great sacrifices, and that this is the reason we leave our previous lives behind, it is with very good reason." His eyes took on that distant, detached look she had seen in Duncan's, during those final days at Ostagar. "When the archdemon appears, one of us must die to destroy it." 

* * *

She understood, now, why Duncan and Riordan were detached. Cold. Distant. Untouchable.

She felt herself doing the same thing. Felt herself picking up Ella as though the hands that held the babe belonged to someone else's body. Ella sensed it as well, squirming, refusing to settle to nurse, crying disconsolately as her hunger mounted. For her daughter's sake Rìona tried to come back to herself, to return from that empty place and offer her babe comfort, but the horror was too deep. It was as it had been that day in the Circle Tower when she had resolved to offer her body to demons. She must make herself feel _nothing_, for feeling _anything_—especially, _especially_ that desperate, all-consuming love she carried for her babe—would result in utter hysterics.

Three Grey Wardens in all of Ferelden. Even if they could bring down Loghain, there was no guarantee that they could bring in Grey Wardens from Orlais in time to confront the archdemon. At least one of them would die, his or her soul obliterated to prevent the passing of the archdemon's corrupted soul to another tainted body.

It could be Riordan. Should be Riordan. He had assured her that, if he lived until that moment, the final blow would be his to make. But there were no guarantees. He might die before reaching the archdemon, overwhelmed by the horde, or simply be too far away at the critical instant.

Never since the moment she had raised the Joining chalice to her lips, had Rìona truly felt the taint within her blood, the corruption that made her akin to the darkspawn. She felt unclean, unholy, forsaken by the Maker.

They were, all three of them, nothing more than walking corpses who had simply not yet come to the right moment to die.

Alistair didn't know. Maker, how was she to tell him? He would insist that it must be him. Andraste's mercy, with the hopelessness that had been in his eyes these past two days, since he'd pledged himself to Anora, he would probably welcome it.

If she told Alistair, she would lose him. And if she didn't...

She looked down at the babe in her arms. What would become of Ella, if she wasn't there? Would her precious daughter once again become a pawn for political intrigues, without her mother to protect her?

When Alistair had told them that he had pledged their support to keep Anora on the throne—before he had confessed the other half of his bargain—Rìona had been relieved. If they gave Anora their support it meant that, once the Blight was over, they could take Ella away and raise her in obscurity, someplace where no one knew she was the bastard heir to the Fereldan throne. No one would ever attempt to control and manipulate her, the way Arl Eamon had with Alistair. No one would ever try to take her away.

More than anything, Rìona wished she had never thought to play her game of seduction and manipulation with Cailan. With her babe and her beloved men at her side, she wanted nothing to do with crowns and courts and politics. Perhaps it was selfish, to be completely willing to leave Ferelden in the hands of a queen whose fitness to rule she questioned on so many levels, but Rìona no longer cared. Nothing mattered, but that Ella was safe and in her arms.

After Alistair had told them the rest, how he had offered himself to shore up Anora's claim to the throne, Rìona's relief had faded, replaced by an unspeakably bitter grief over what Alistair had sacrificed, so that she need not be parted from Ella. It was yet another indication of how much she had changed, since that day Duncan had come to Highever, that Rìona was so appalled. She was not the same calculating creature who had once spoken to Ser Gilmore so cavalierly about the irrelevance of passion or love when making an advantageous marriage. Now, all she could think of was what Alistair had given up, the foundation of a family and lasting happiness they had all laid together, she and Alistair and Zevran. Her heart ached for her own loss, but even more so for his. She grieved at the prospect of the lonely and loveless life to which he had committed himself.

And yet, despite that, her foremost concern had been for her child, and how grateful she was that Anora had agreed to destroy Cailan's document and cede all claim to custody of Ella. With or without Alistair, Rìona would still be able take her babe away from court and keep her safe.

But now, what would become of Ella? Rìona couldn't be certain which was the least selfish option: to lay the burden the archdemon upon another, or to do it herself. If Riordan failed, Rìona could only spare Alistair at the expense of leaving her daughter without a mother. If she refused then she would lose Alistair, but gain a lifetime with Ella.

How was she to make that choice?

It felt strange, that mundane affairs continued to progress after the news she had received. Surely the world should have paused, until Rìona had some hope of comprehending matters, but it didn't. The new wet-nurse arrived, along with a handful of servants Arl Bryland's wife sent to help set the Cousland manor back to rights, and Rìona found herself with no other choice but to manage them.

Aeda, the wet-nurse, was a sweet and gentle older woman with a babe only slightly younger than Ella. It was her fifth child—the others would be cared for by her family, while she took up her position within Rìona's household, until the Blight was over and Rìona could establish a large enough household to absorb her entire family—and she had milk in abundance for two babes. Ella was not particularly pleased at being handed off, until a milk-full breast was proffered, and then she was content with this stranger. Reluctantly, Rìona left her in Aeda's care and turned her attention to overseeing the servants on loan from the Bryland manor.

The mindless minutia afforded her little time to brood.

Her companions returned late in the evening, their armor and weapons bloody, bearing shocking news. Loghain had been allowing Tevinter slavers to operate out of the Alienage. To fund his need for mercenary troops, and the supplies to support them, he had allowed slavers to abduct the elves and ship them far from Ferelden's shores. Zevran bore a particularly savage smile as he reported that the slavers were now dead, and documents bearing the regent's signature and seal, giving permission and accepting payment for the operation, had been secured.

It should have been a moment of triumph. They had yet more proof of Loghain's transgressions to use against him in the Landsmeet. Dutifully, Rìona summoned a wan smile and some semblance of enthusiasm for the victory they had won, and ordered the borrowed servants to prepare baths.

She lifted her eyes at a prickling down the back of her neck to find Zevran watching her, his eyes dark with concern. Rìona immediately felt caught-out, exposed. Did he know something? Had he guessed? But then his gaze shifted to Alistair, who stood by the hearth, staring into the flames with the heavy frown he had habitually worn since gaining Rìona and Ella's release from the palace. Rìona realized she had misread Zevran's concern. It was Alistair for whom he was worried.

She wondered if it was even harder for Zevran, for all his presumed complacency. She could not have imagined the closeness that would spring up between the two of them, while caring for Ella had distracted her so much. Alistair had made it clear that he could not consider any sort of arrangement where Zevran and Rìona remained near him as his lovers, after he was wed to Anora. Zevran seemed to take that news in his stride, and yet Rìona couldn't believe he was as unaffected as he seemed.

None of them had experienced any joy since they had come to Denerim. She missed those few, fleeting weeks of simplicity and contentment they'd had in Redcliffe. Once politics had taken over, that had disappeared, and now all that was left was the near-certain knowledge of impending doom.

Two days. The Landsmeet was in two days. After that, Alistair would be ensconced in the palace, taking up the mantle of king. He would belong to Ferelden, rather than to her and Zevran and Ella. They had so little time remaining to them.

Rìona drew a deep breath and went to the makeshift nursery in which she had settled the wet-nurse and her babe.

"Mistress Aeda, I have matters which need my attention this evening. You will keep Ella here with you; I'll come get her sometime during the night."

"Yes, my lady," the wet-nurse agreed with a bob of her head, looking up from suckling her own son while Ella slept in the cradle nearby. Rìona paused to lay her hand gently upon the sleeping babe, feeling her warmth, the rapid rise and fall of her chest, the softness of her skin and fine flaxen curls.

She turned away quickly, before the sudden tightness in her throat undid her composure entirely.

One night. One final night of joy she would claim for them, before duty tore them all apart.

"Where's Ella?" Alistair asked, looking up as Rìona entered the master's chambers. He was still in the bath, while Zevran say by the hearth, drying his hair with a linen cloth near the fire.

"She'll be sleeping in the nursery with the wet-nurse tonight," Rìona answered calmly, ruthlessly pushing back her despair as she began to unlace her bodice.

"Oh?" Zevran's voice dropped, his tone shifting to something dark and knowing and full of possibility. At the same moment Alistair's eyes took on a hungry gleam in the firelight. It had been over two months since Ella's birth, and she hadn't been with either of them since before that event. Despite the sorrow and fear that made her feel hollow inside, she still felt the cramping surge of arousal that tightened her body from the waist down.

"Indeed," she murmured. She wanted to smile for them, but she knew it would ring false to those keenly perceptive eyes that knew her so well. Instead, she let her gown slide down to pool on the floor and crossed to the tub in which Alistair sat, sitting on the edge and taking up a cloth to wash his back.

But Alistair had other ideas. Reaching out, he hauled Rìona bodily into the bath with him, careless of the fact that she still wore her woolen stockings and thin linen shift. The latter was quickly reduced to a transparent film that clung to her skin, darkened by shadows where her nipples, and the dark, glossy curls between her thighs, dwelt.

Before she could utter more than a gasp of surprise, Alistair's mouth plummeted down upon hers, capturing whatever protest she might have uttered. Rìona wrapped herself around him, clinging tightly to his neck, returning the urgent kisses fervently. And when he drew back to survey her disheveled state with an impish grin, she found she was able to smile for him and laugh gaily, until his eyes grew sober.

"No good-byes, love," he demanded gently, lifting one of her hands to press a kiss into the palm. "Promise me."

Her smile grew tremulous. "If that is what you wish."

He drew her down into another desperate kiss, and Rìona twined her arms around him, carding her fingers through his unbound hair as she shifted to straddle his thighs. Her shift bunched up near her hips, and the slightest adjustment pressed his rapidly hardening length against the linen of her smallclothes, where they covered her sex. She and Alistair gasped in unison at the pressure, thrusting in tandem to increase it.

Suddenly Alistair's hands were everywhere, delving into her hair one moment to guide her in their kiss, then peeling her sodden shift away from her breasts to release their heavy weight. One hand cupped her breast, hefting it, while the other settled at the base of her spine above the mound of her backside and jerked her closer. Rìona gave a hitching sigh, her head falling back as Alistair's lips and teeth traveled down the exposed column of her throat. He lifted her breast as his head dipped, his mouth closing over the nipple, drawing it inside.

An instant later, he made a surprised, pleased sound and began sucking harder, his tongue stroking across her nipple as he sampled the sweetness of her milk. He lifted his head to give the other breast the same attention, tugging on her to draw her firmly against his shaft again as Rìona cradled his head to her breast.

"Alistair..." she moaned softly, and he looked up, flicking a white droplet from his lip with the tip of his tongue. His eyes were dark and hazy with desire, and he very deliberately gripped her hips and pressed up against her. Rìona's eyes rolled back in her head, a pleasured mewl rising from her lips. Over and over, he drew her down and surged up against her, their bodies rocking together as though the barrier of her smallclothes wasn't there at all. It had been so long, it was almost ridiculously easy to bring her to the brink. Just that bit of pressure, his length rubbing along the wet linen stretched taut over her cleft, and she shuddered in his arms, the rafters overhead swimming in her dazed vision before her eyes snapped shut and she gasped out her pleasure with breathless cries.

When she looked down, Zevran was there, turning Alistair's head, drawing him into a kiss even as his eyes sought Rìona's. She nodded once.

Yes. Let this be about Alistair, and what he had sacrificed. Let them assume that was the end of it.

"Come, _mis amados,_" he purred, reaching for Rìona. "This basin is not big enough for three. The water will be cold soon, and I have missed the touch of our Rìona as well."

She let herself be drawn out of Alistair's arms and out of the bath. Her sodden shift slopped wetly to the stone floor to be dealt with later as Zevran peeled it down her body. He toweled her dry, guiding her backward toward the bed between kisses, where he pushed her down onto her back and knelt to draw her simple stockings down her legs. His lips followed the descent of the wet wool, trailing down her leg from knee to toe. Rìona made a sound of surprise as he drew her big toe into his mouth, twirling his tongue around it, sucking. His hands kneaded her calf, supported her foot as he moved onto the next toe, and the next, the suction of his mouth sending tension along an unexpected path to her nipples and groin. Rìona clutched twin handfuls of the coverlet, her eyes fluttering closed as she moaned softly.

Alistair emerged from the bath, drying himself before the hearth and watching with passion-heavy eyes as Zevran removed her other stocking with the same ritual. Zevran's deft fingers hooked into the cloth of her smallclothes and Rìona lifted her hips to allow him to draw them down her thighs. Once they were consigned to the floor with the rest of her wet garments, his lips and tongue blazed a trail up the length of her leg. His nose nestled in her curls as he nuzzled her, breathing deeply as his tongue flicked out to sample her, sliding between her folds.

Suddenly Alistair was there, beside her head, kissing her, catching her cries as Zevran brought her to the precipice with lips and tongue, flicks and sucks. Zevran curled his hands under her splayed thighs, holding her open against his mouth when an excess of sensation tried to make her buck and writhe, and drove her mercilessly beyond the boundaries of sense and sanity. Her clawed fingers bit into Alistair's hands as he watched her tumble over the edge, as though he would memorize every contortion her face made in her transport.

She had scarcely recovered her breath when Zevran drew back, dragging her forward to the edge of the bed by that grip on her thighs and sliding into her with a single smooth, deep thrust. Alistair echoed their combined groans, his eyes avid upon them, but Rìona had no chance to drink in his reaction, for Zevran set a demanding pace that soon had Rìona biting back strangled cries.

How he managed to switch their positions, Rìona couldn't say. Somewhere in the fog of pleasure, he wound up beneath her there, half-hanging off the foot of the bed. He drew her back down onto him, his hands traveling a circuit from her breasts down her ribs to her waist, and back up again.

Zevran drew her down into a deep kiss, stilling her movements as they lay there still, panting together. He tasted of her own smoky essence, and there was a tremor in his hands that spoke of an effort to maintain control.

She broke away from the kiss to look up at Alistair, who watched them as though he were a starving man at a banquet. Despite the hunger in his gaze, there was still a shadow of loss, and Rìona had to force herself not to seek to soothe it.

She had known, long before she and Alistair had first made love, how tenuous their attempts to be together were, and how duty might tear them apart. Zevran's joining their relationship hadn't changed that, save to create a short period where they had actively tried to forge a future for all of them together as a family.

They had failed.

No good-byes, had been his request. Yet time was running out, and they had been given so little time to explore all the pleasures the three of them could share together. Those pleasures, Alistair would no doubt never seek for himself after he was wed to Anora or, if he did, he would do so in shame, considering them profligate. The unrestrained, unashamed man he had become in these remarkable months would be gone.

"I want you inside me also, Alistair," Rìona said softly, blinking against the burning in her eyes.

"You're sure?"

She nodded. "I want us all to be together as we should be, if only once."

"Rìona, please..."

"No good-byes," she promised, giving him an encouraging smile. Zevran was uncharacteristically silent, his shameless sense of fun in the face of pleasure notably absent. She loved him all the more, for making no false effort to lighten the mood. "But... no regrets either. No missed opportunities, or longing for things undone."

Zevran drew her down to his chest, holding her, as Alistair retrieved the oil and stepped up behind her, preparing her with gentle, conscientious fingers as she had taught him to do all those months ago. Rìona pressed her face into Zevran's shoulder, shuddering. Did they realize, either of them, that this was something she had never experienced before? She was glad, immeasurably glad, that it would be with these two beloved men, this once, and never again.

She gripped Zevran's arms tightly, as Alistair pressed into her with exquisite care, moaning against his neck. The intensity was almost more than she could bear, despite her efforts to relax and, when Alistair draped himself over her, they were still a long moment as she adapted. He shuddered against her back, his skin damp with sweat despite the autumnal chill pervading the chamber. Beneath her, Zevran, too, showed signs of strain, his head thrown back, his neck extended, his arms clutching Rìona to him a bit too tightly, even as one of his hands stroked her hair soothingly.

"Are you all right?" Alistair panted against her shoulder.

Rìona nodded mutely, pushing herself up from Zevran's chest just a fraction. Alistair's arms immediately slid into the gap, encircling her. There was a touch of desperation to that embrace, she thought, happy to let it engulf her. Zevran's arms came up as well, bracketing Rìona as his hands caressed Alistair's arms with every bit as much tenderness and love as he had touched Rìona.

Ah, Maker! The unfairness of it all! She ducked her head again, biting her lip against the urge to weep.

"I cannot bear much more, _mis queridos,_" Zevran said, a ragged edge to his voice that belied the tenderness of his embrace, and Alistair groaned into Rìona's hair, echoing the sentiment.

Which of them began to move, and when, and how the mechanics were accomplished, was lost on Rìona, swept away in near-overwhelming sensation and pleasure so powerful she wasn't certain she could endure it. Vaguely, she was aware of the flutters of another climax, but it was overridden by the intensity of having them both within her. It seemed an eternity, that the two of them moved within her, slowly picking up an awkward rhythm. It didn't matter, that their movements were shallow and stilted. What mattered were their arms, embracing her, and Alistair's lips upon her shoulders, and Zevran's hands, reaching for her face and drawing her down into a kiss.

They were making love, the three of them. More than the mechanics of their bodies, more than the pleasure that began to mount and spiral. Beyond all of that was love and sorrow.

Behind her Alistair cried out, gripping her harder, pulsing deep within her. Zevran followed only seconds later, his beautiful face strained with pleasure. Rìona treasured each shudder and gasp.

At length, they wound up curled together on the bed, gentle kisses and caresses exchanged without hesitation or restraint, until sleep claimed first Alistair and then Zevran. Rìona lay wakeful between them, her mind too full to allow her to rest, her body still thrumming with the near-ache that came in the aftermath of such exquisite pleasure. How long she lay there she wasn't certain, but finally she carefully extricated herself from between them. Ever-vigilant even in repose, Zevran's eyes slitted open.

"I'm just going to check on Ella," she murmured. "Go back to sleep."

In the nursery, she found Aeda struggling to soothe the two hungry infants, for the wet-nurse was not yet adept at juggling them both. She thanked Rìona gratefully when Rìona claimed Ella and took the babe back with her to the bedchamber that had once belonged to her father and mother. Holding Ella in one arm, Rìona drew the bed-curtains closed around Alistair and Zevran, who lay half-bare, tangled in the bedclothes. In her absence, they had migrated together for warmth, so that Zevran lay curled against Alistair's back, an arm flung across Alistair's hip. The sight made her heart ache a little. Absorbed with Ella in those early weeks, she had missed noticing much of the intimacy that had developed between them.

She threw another log on the embers of the fire and stoked it, then sat in a chair before the hearth and opened her dressing gown, bringing Ella to her breast. And as she gently touched the soft curls crowning Ella's head, she began to weep with silent anguish.

She tried to imagine not being there to see her daughter grow into the woman she would someday become, not being able to see Ella discover the world and find—or forge—her place within it. A lifetime of experiences awaited her precious daughter, and Rìona would not be present for them.

She knew what she had to do.

Ferelden needed Alistair. They needed a king with not only a kind heart, but also the good sense and responsibility Cailan had lacked, someone who wouldn't permit the queen free rein to run the country as she wished. Anora was too immersed in her own power; she would sacrifice the well-being of others to maintain her place, even as she justified to herself that she did so for the good of the realm. Ferelden needed Alistair's honesty and integrity to balance out that ambition. Alistair would make certain his queen did not forget her duty to the common people.

He would acknowledge Ella and make her his heir. But, more importantly, he would protect her, perhaps better than Rìona could by taking her away. Rìona was too much a product of the aristocracy to which she had been born. She fell too easily into the habits of political intrigue. But Alistair was apart from all that. He would assure, as best he was able, that Ella claimed her birthright without becoming a pawn in the gambits and machinations of others.

And Zevran... Zevran would be with him, helping him. Rìona was the reason Alistair was so determined not to permit either of them to linger at court as his lovers. Deep inside, he knew Rìona would always feel it to be a bit of a degradation, while Zevran would not. With Zevran beside him, Alistair wouldn't be alone, lost in the cold and loveless world of politics. And between the two of them, Ella could have no more stalwart protectors.

With Rìona gone, history would recall Ella's mother as the Grey Warden who ended the Blight, not as a fallen noblewoman whose mother was rumored to have been a whore. There would be no scandal to shame Ella as she grew to womanhood.

It went against everything Rìona had ever believed about herself, to withhold from Alistair what Riordan had told her. It made every conceit she'd ever had about her own sense of unrelenting honesty into nothing more than hypocrisy. And yet, it was the only way.

She could only pray that, someday, Alistair would forgive her the deception.


	60. Chapter Sixty: Confrontation

Zevran did not regret the role he had chosen for himself, and yet it was difficult to be able to offer no more than oblique comfort, when his Wardens both looked as though the world was ending. But there were others around, most notably the queen—in whose presence he had to tightly restrain his fury—and so discretion was called for.

They looked lovely, his Wardens, groomed and polished within an inch of their lives. They would be putting on a display for this Landsmeet of theirs, and so they had arrayed themselves with suitable splendor. He had seen such things while sneaking around the courts of Antiva City, though the pageantry there was more about beauty and dangerous seduction and less about martial ability.

Rìona was in her armor again, her bow at her back, portraying herself as the general she had made herself out to be, all these months as they had gathered their army. She had nursed Ella one final time before dressing, muttering something about not wishing to spring a leak before the Landsmeet. Then, a shadow of grief had come over her face as she handed the babe off to the wet-nurse.

"You'll be feeding her exclusively from now on Aeda, now that she's becoming accustomed to you," she had informed the woman. "I imagine that, after the Landsmeet is concluded, I will have many other matters I must attend to. It is best that she is not... reliant upon me for suckling any longer."

Zevran had frowned as Rìona strode quickly from the room without a backward glance. She took such joy in caring for Ella. He could not comprehend why she would cut herself off from the task. Was it merely her inability to devote herself entirely to her babe that troubled her? But his attention was distracted when Alistair had appeared, resplendent in his brother's golden armor.

"We should get to the palace," he muttered glumly, as though the word _palace_ actually meant _gallows._ "I'm supposed to walk in with Anora on my arm, apparently. Put on a display of unity. We're to join up with her there."

The queen looked peevish when they arrived, as though they had kept her waiting. She was also slightly pale, dabbing her brow with a handkerchief.

"Well, good to know she's human enough to be nervous," Alistair muttered, and Zevran smirked in response, though it faded when Rìona glanced away and, in doing so, reminded Zevran of what they were to lose that day. She gave the queen a coldly stilted, perfectly executed bow as Alistair stepped forward.

"The Landsmeet convened a half-hour ago. Are you ready?" the queen demanded, barely glancing at Zevran and the rest of the companions, arrayed behind their Wardens. Just like that, those who had fought beside the Wardens all through the last year were disregarded. Zevran did not mind it so much himself—being beneath the notice of various exalted personages was frequently useful—but the others deserved better.

Their first confrontation came before they even entered the Landsmeet chamber, with the soldier who had arrested Alistair and Rìona after they had killed Howe. She was not accompanied by enough men to stop them but, still, remembering the betrayal of that day, and especially at whose word that betrayal had come, Zevran's muscles tightened. As he had done when they had first entered the foyer leading to the Landsmeet chamber, his eyes scanned the corners and shadows, seeking the hidden trap. But the soldier faltered when the queen stepped forward.

"Your Majesty!" Confused, she looked back and forth between the queen and the Wardens. "Are you well? These Wardens, have they—?"

"Stand down, Cauthrien." Zevran had to admire the queen's composure, despite her persistent pallor. Such utter confidence and lack of emotional inflection would do a Crow master proud.

"Your Majesty! Surely you cannot mean to betray your own father!"

"Would you rather I stand by while he destroys everything he claims to love?" the queen asked calmly. "You and I have both been silent too long, seeing what he was becoming and saying nothing while he descended into madness. Stand down, Cauthrien, while we may still stop him."

It was a long, tense moment in which Zevran's fingers itched for his daggers, before the soldier bowed deeply and stood aside. Alistair drew a deep breath and offered his elbow to the queen. She jerked away from it with a disdainful look, and proceeded to enter the Landsmeet chamber a pace ahead of him. Alistair followed quickly, with something that might have been a soft sigh of resignation.

When Zevran glanced at Rìona, her mouth was drawn into a grim, angry line. Then she lifted her chin, following a pace behind Alistair and the queen.

The politics of the day were largely irrelevant to Zevran's interests. He was there to survey for covert threats. Assassination was—theoretically—not allowed in the Landsmeet, but so much of the tradition of Fereldan politics had been subverted by Loghain already that Rìona was unable to deny the possibility that he might descend to such tactics, when Zevran questioned her about it.

Therefore, Zevran made it his job to watch the crowd and the shadows, wary of the unseen crossbow bolt from behind a tapestry. It made him somewhat inattentive to the details of what was being discussed. The large man shouted a great deal and Zevran's Wardens, flanking the queen, argued in return.

Rìona was in fine form, her cultured courtesan's voice, combined with her orator's skills, weaving their spell around the chamber. Her grief when she listed Loghain's crimes and recounted the lives that had been lost on his account was a near-palpable thing, sincerity and tears shining in her eyes as she spoke compellingly of what the man had made of their beloved homeland.

It was difficult to say which carried the most weight, his Warden's sincerity and conviction, or the queen's denunciation of her father. Either way, when the gathered nobility voted, Loghain was most displeased with the results. It was then that his façade of reason and blunt-spoken derision started to crumble, and he began to rant.

Accusing the entire Landsmeet of being traitors and Orlesian sympathizers was perhaps not his best bet for swaying them in his favor.

Somehow, Zevran had thought Rìona was joking when she had mentioned challenging another to a duel on the floor of the Landsmeet chamber. But that was what the regent did, glaring defiantly at the Wardens and calling upon his right to personal combat, and no one laughed.

Couldn't they simply build up their own Crow cells and deal with eliminating their enemies in a more civilized fashion? he wondered, finding himself invested in the proceedings for the first time when Alistair took up the challenge. This was unexpected, and not to his liking. If things went badly for Alistair—and for all his bluster, this Loghain seemed like a mighty warrior, possibly equal to Alistair's considerable skill and youthful stamina—Zevran would have no recourse, no way of protecting Alistair. None of them would.

Was there some way he could slip poison to the regent before the single combat commenced? Zevran cursed the damnable sense of Fereldan honor that made open and honest confrontation seem like an act of nobility rather than a foolhardy invitation to suicide.

The savage gleam in Alistair's eyes did nothing to reassure him. For him, this was a personal vendetta that had nothing to do with politics. Now he would risk death to avenge his fallen brethren. If his passionate resolve was not equal to Loghain's experience and cunning, they would lose him this day, and Zevran was powerless to stop it.

Rìona seemed undecided for a moment, before she disregarded the queen's quelling presence to draw Alistair aside and murmur to him, "I would beg you not to think of Duncan, or the Grey Wardens, but I know it would be futile. Do not let it make you reckless. You are not Oghren, to harness your rage to devastating effect. We are here for justice, and none will be had if your anger gives you a vulnerability he may exploit."

Alistair nodded grimly and stepped to the center of the chamber, drawing his father's sword. He looked every inch the young, regal king in that moment, beautiful to behold and deadly of purpose. Had the entire affair been less idiotic, Zevran thought he would likely have been thoroughly aroused by the spectacle.

How had he ever noticed how loud it was, when a sword struck a shield full-on, or when an armor-clad body went crashing to the floor, hurled backward by that same shield swung in a powerful arc that landed with an impact that would have shattered the bones of an unarmored man.

It seemed an eternity that they pummeled and battered each other, until they both heaved for breath and the effort of lifting their swords began to tell in their arms. In the end, it was the older man who was unable to rise when Alistair sent him crashing to the floor.

Alistair kicked the man's sword and shield away, as Loghain pushed himself up and knelt, yielding the battle.

"There's something of your father in you, after all," he said, still panting and heaving for breath. Alistair's fist tightened on the hilt of his sword. He advanced a step, muttering something about his mentor, Duncan, and then stopped.

Zevran watched, as he looked to the queen. She was even paler than she had been that morning, but something cold and revolted glinted in her eyes as she watched.

"If I kill him, our deal is off, isn't it?" Alistair asked, his lips twisting bitterly.

"Do you honestly believe I would keep such a bargain with the man who murdered my father?"

Zevran nearly spat in disgust as Alistair sheathed his sword. But there was nothing he could say to encourage Alistair to kill his foe. Not here.

"Take him to Fort Drakon," Alistair snapped at the palace guards lining the Landsmeet chamber. "When the Blight is over, he'll stand trial before the Landsmeet for regicide, high treason, usurpation of royal authority, and crimes against the sovereign rights of the bannorn." He turned a glare upon the queen. "That's the best you're going to get from me."

She nodded, sagging a little, the brittle air of disdain with which she had surrounded herself since they had arrived at the palace nowhere to be seen. Alistair turned to Arl Eamon and demanded he call for a recess. They had spent all day in debate, and it was late in the evening. Soon thereafter the Landsmeet dispersed, to be reconvened in the morning.

Zevran watched the queen with detached curiosity as she left, assuring Alistair she would make certain her chamberlain made quarters ready for him in the palace. Alistair was too livid to remark upon her discomposure, pacing and snarling furiously as Rìona and the rest of their companions made ready to depart.

"Thank you, Alistair," Rìona murmured when he had calmed a bit. "I despise the man, for what he allowed Howe to do to my family, and for what he's done to Ferelden, but not like you do. What you've given up, so that we won't lose Ella... I'm sorry."

"Don't. Please," Alistair shook his head, brushing her cheek with his knuckles, and looked confused when Rìona ducked away from the touch. "I'd give up much more than that, to keep you and Ella safe."

"I know you would," she whispered, and turned away.

They left Alistair behind at the palace and made their way back to Rìona's family estate without him. Rìona was silent and withdrawn. If she had been grieving, Zevran perhaps could have comforted her, but not even that was a consideration. She checked on Ella, but did not linger to hold and dandle and dote upon the babe as she normally would. Instead, she retreated to their bedchamber. Zevran was only moments behind her, but by the time he arrived, she was already in bed, facing away from the door. She lay on her side, her bare arms and shoulders above the coverlets, staring at the fire on the hearth.

Silently, he undressed and climbed into bed, but when he tried to lay a hand upon her shoulder, she shrugged it off, and pulled further away.

Zevran frowned at her back. She had been different, since that day Alistair had bargained with the queen. Was she simply mourning the sacrifice he had made, or was it more than that? She seemed to be retreating from them all, even little Ella, and he did not know why, or how to call her back.

Troubled, he stared up at the canopy, silently drumming his fingers upon his chest and waiting.

The manor house had long since gone silent — their companions and the borrowed servants settling in for the night — when shouting in the courtyard, and an urgent pounding at the front door, awoke them all. Zevran leapt from the bed, pulling on his breeches while Rìona donned her dressing gown and grabbed her bow. Outside the door, Shale's thunderous footfalls sounded in the foyer and Sten charged down the stairs, his enormous sword in his hand.

Leliana clutched her bow and Wynne her staff as they joined Rìona and Zevran at the top of the stairs above the main hall, while the servant acting as a chamberlain opened the door, Shale and Sten flanking him, ready for combat.

The palace guard looked astonished to be greeted in such a way, and it took him a moment to collect himself.

"Forgive the late intrusion. Warden—I mean, Prince Alistair summons Lady Cousland and Enchanter Wynne to the palace. The queen has fallen ill."

"Of course," Rìona said quickly. "Allow us a moment to ready ourselves."

"You will not be going alone," Zevran informed her, falling into step behind Rìona as she made her way back to the bedchamber. She tossed aside her dressing gown and began wrapping her breasts in tight linen bindings, grimacing when they began to leak.

"You can't believe _Alistair_ is laying a trap for me?" She pulled on her linen shirt and began to strap her cuirass over it, giving way when Zevran brushed her hands aside to help her with the buckles.

"Of course not," he shrugged. "Perhaps it is not concern that motivates me, but curiosity, yes?"

Rìona gave him a queer look but, without further argument, the matter was decided.

Alistair looked grave when they arrived at the palace, to be received in an antechamber of the queen's suite.

"I noticed she looked pale today at the Landsmeet, but I just thought it was nerves," he said, rambling a bit when Wynne questioned him about the queen's condition. "I should have known better. I think—" he hesitated, swallowing hard. "I'm almost certain it's the corruption."

"How could that be?" Rìona demanded, stunned.

"I don't know, but it's starting to look more like it. There's some... scaling... on her skin, her maid says, and she's beginning to _feel_ like... well, like someone not human, when I'm around her." Alistair shrugged, tugging at his queue. "Are we _absolutely certain_ Muirne couldn't have been infected? That's what Erlina assumes to be the cause."

"There's no way she could have been," Rìona replied with a shake of her head. "If she had been, then surely _Ella_ would have been exposed. But if not, then I can't imagine how..."

Zevran stood back, his arms folded over his chest, watching calmly as Alistair's head came up, and his face went a little white. His eyes sought Zevran's as he murmured to Rìona and Wynne, "Why don't the two of you go in. I'll need your opinions, to make certain it is what I think it is, before I summon Loghain from Fort Drakon. She's his daughter. I ought to at least give him a chance to say good-bye, and see if he wants to be the one to... end it."

Zevran watched impassively as Rìona and Wynne filed out of the room, following the maidservant Erlina to the queen's bedchamber. Alistair continued to stare at him a long moment, before finally saying bitterly, "I knew you'd never be so careless as to forget to clean a bloodied dagger. Had you been saving that since the Deep Roads, just in case?"

Zevran's lips curled into a humorless smile, as he forced himself to say without concern, "Interesting thing about the Blight. Someone comes down with the Blight-sickness, no one thinks to consider poison. An assassin enterprising enough to brave the dangers of handling darkspawn blood could make a fortune."

Alistair groaned. "I think I'm going to be sick. Maker's breath, Zev. _Why?_"

Zevran shrugged. "Does it matter why?"

"Yes, it _bloody well does!_" Alistair shouted, then cast a worried look at the doors, mindful of the guards lurking outside. Lowering his voice, he hissed, "Do you understand that you could be put to death for this?"

"I could be put to death many times over, for the things I have done in my life," Zevran replied in a carefree tone that wasn't as effortless as he would have liked it to have been.

"Maybe, but now, _I_ would have an obligation to..." Alistair seemed almost on the verge of tears, hurt and disillusioned, pacing anxiously, and Zevran found he could no longer pretend not to care, releasing the façade of casual nonchalance with a sigh. "Please. Just tell me why."

"Do you truly think your queen would ever leave our Ella alone, a naked blade aimed at her back?"

"She burned the letter; I saw her do it. She wouldn't have had any grounds for a claim, and even if she had, I would never have let her touch Ella. You know that!"

"Perhaps. Or perhaps you would have wielded less influence than you assume."

A long moment of silence fell. Then Alistair asked softly, hesitantly, "Just tell me this isn't... Is this about... us? The three of us? So that nothing would interfere with the plans we'd made?"

"What difference would it make, if the darkspawn blood was in her wine before I knew of the bargain you had made, or after?"

"It matters, all right? If you murdered her just because she stood in the way of your own self-interest, it matters!"

"_She_ signed her own death warrant when she threatened my family. No one does that and lives to profit by it. But yes, if you must know, there were other benefits as well, and I was aware of them."

"Andraste's mercy," Alistair sighed. "How am I supposed to trust you after this?"

Zevran felt his entire demeanor get colder, as the instinct to strike back when struck, to fight dirty when backed into a corner, surged forth. His lip curled into a sneer. "It comes as a surprise to you that you have been fucking an assassin?"

Alistair looked like he'd been punched in the gut for a moment, and Zevran almost regretted his defensive reaction. "What? Don't give me that! This has nothing to do with you being an assassin. It has to do with the fact that you killed her, even after I told you not to."

"I am not one of your subjects whom you may command, Your Majesty."

"Oh, Maker's _balls,_ that's not what I'm saying!" He whirled on Zevran, furiously. "Today, I let live the one man in all of Thedas I want to see _dead._ And I hated doing it, but in retrospect, it's probably a bloody good thing that the first thing the Landsmeet saw their king do wasn't for me to murder a man who had yielded. That's not how we do things here, Zevran. This isn't Antiva, or Orlais. We don't solve our problems with murder, with poison and knives in the back. What is it you think Rìona has been saying to us, all this time? That's the sort of thing Loghain and Howe have been doing. It's what we've been fighting against. And if I could let _that man_ live, you could bloody well have swallowed your wounded sense of machismo and resigned yourself to the fact that things weren't going to turn out like we planned, down in the Deep Roads. How can I... be with you, when your way of doing things is contrary to everything I want to try to build here, to salvage something worthwhile from this whole wretched mess?"

"Until today, you were honest enough to admit that the 'worthwhile' part was Rìona by your side, and me in your bed. You do not care about this woman, Anora's, death. She was in your way, too," Zevran observed remorselessly. "Nor did you care about making your country a better place, except that in taking the crown, it won you something else you wanted more. You let that man live today because his survival yielded something you wanted more than his death. 'Self-interest,' as you say. True, Rìona, she says we must strive to make things as they should be. Me? I say self-interest is all we have."

"Maybe you're right. Maybe I don't care. But that doesn't mean I would have sanctioned _this_ if I had known about it." He looked away, shaking his head. "And that doesn't mean I can remain with someone who doesn't see why this is wrong."

It felt strangely foreign, that cold stillness that crept in when he made himself uncaring, untouchable. Perhaps he had become too soft, being with these Wardens, if such instincts that guaranteed survival no longer were second-nature.

"So be it," Zevran replied in clipped tones, and turned away, putting as much distance between Alistair and himself as he could within the confines of the well-appointed sitting room. He watched silently, willfully unaffected, as Rìona and Wynne emerged from the queen's bedchamber, looking grim.

Palace guards were sent to Fort Drakon to bring the erstwhile regent, and Zevran was happy to remain silent and inconspicuous while Alistair and Rìona informed him that his daughter was dying. Loghain was not inclined to notice the presence of the familiar elf at the far end of the room, however, as he charged into his daughter's bedchamber.

He never learned whether it was Alistair or Loghain who delivered mercy to the queen. All he knew was that both men looked much older when they emerged, and Alistair ordered the guard to send for the Grand Cleric so that they might arrange for the burning rites. Then he sent another guard to summon the Seneschal of the Landsmeet to discuss delaying the continuation of the Landsmeet until after the burning.

And with that, their Alistair became a king before their eyes. Zevran watched it happen, and made himself feel nothing.

_A/N: There will be artwork for this chapter, but it won't be done for a day or two due to **dragonreine** having some trouble with her wrist. Come back and visit later._


	61. Chapter Sixty One: Withdrawal

"Alistair, I'm begging you not to do this."

"Why not?" he demanded, turning on her with a slightly betrayed look in his eyes.

"It's not necessary." Rìona drew a deep breath. "Make Ella your heir, by all means. She looks enough like Cailan that there's no reason for anyone to doubt she is exactly whom you claim her to be. You don't have to wed me to do that."

"Oh, Maker's breath!" he growled, pacing away from her in the confines of his new study in the palace. "Is this... is this about Zevran? I already told you, I'm not going to ask you to let him go, not while everything is still so unsettled and any of us could die when we finally go up against the horde. Have you already chosen? Is that the problem? You want to be with him?"

"No, Alistair, that's not the issue. I simply... it was fortunate you didn't formally announce your betrothal to Anora at the Landsmeet that day. It means you don't have to observe a period of mourning for her, before you choose a queen. If you wed me and name me as your queen, and then I fall in the battle to come, it will be much more complicated. There will be... a—a delay, a power vacuum, a great deal of jockeying for position and noblemen putting their daughters forward and it will be just that much longer before there's stability in the realm. If you start out with an heir in place and no wife, no one will have an expectation of there being a queen. At least... not right away."

Alistair rubbed his brow, looking harassed. "I may be new to politics, but I _know_ that doesn't make any sense."

Rìona bit her lip and looked away, blinking rapidly at the burn that sprang too readily to her eyes. "I'm not a great warrior like you. You must know the odds of my surviving what's to come are... not good."

A concerned frown etched his brow. Suddenly solicitous, he crossed to her and took her shoulders in his hands, rubbing gently. "What's this all about, love?"

"Alistair, please. You cannot wed me. Promise me you won't try to make such an announcement this afternoon when the Landsmeet reconvenes. Accept the crown, make Ella your heir, and leave it at that."

"I don't have a choice!" he snapped, instantly frustrated again. "You've seen what Howe has made of Denerim. Someone has to sort that out, and it can't be me. I have to be with the army, and even if I didn't, I don't know the first thing about that sort of administrative detail."

"Then appoint a chancellor! Appoint a new Arl of Denerim, for that matter."

"Appoint whom? Half our army is commanded by Teagan and Eamon. They need to march with us. I don't know the rest of the nobility that well. As soon as I start trying to choose, it will create a void somewhere else. I don't have time to shuffle the nobility around."

"Be that as it may, you can't—"

"And besides," the sudden softness to Alistair's voice silenced Rìona's protest, "what if it's not you who falls when we go up against the horde? If I die, even with Ella as my heir, there's going to be another civil war, just when the realm is trying to recover from the Blight, a fight for the regency. Do you really want to risk a stranger having that sort of authority over Ella?"

Rìona's voice caught, and it took her a moment to clear her throat and respond, "The Landsmeet would have to confirm me, it could still come to that if someone challenges."

"If we succeed... If we stop the Blight, love, if we do what we've set out to do, you know that won't be an issue."

"_Please_, Alistair...!" She couldn't control the note of desperation in her voice. "You must not do this!"

"I'm sorry," he murmured sadly. "I don't have a choice."

"I'll refuse! Publicly, if I must!"

"And weaken me before the Landsmeet the moment I'm confirmed?" he asked incredulously. Maker, when had he learned that cynical quirk of his brow?

"Curse you, Alistair," Rìona muttered, turning away, her fists clenched at her sides in impotent frustration. "You don't understand what you're doing."

"Is there something you're not telling me? Because I don't understand what has changed, that suddenly this is so much worse an idea than it was in Redcliffe."

"In Redcliffe our concern was in maximizing your chances of success. Having me as your queen was a gamble on that front, but one that could just as easily have paid off well as it could have failed. But now—" she spread her hands in a helpless shrug. "Now the throne is yours. There are no contenders. Loghain is brought down. Now our primary concern must be recovery after the Blight and long-term stability for the realm."

Alistair growled softly in confusion. "And you don't think you have that to offer? Maker's breath, Rìona, you've been groomed to rule since you were born."

"But if I fall—"

"_Why_ are you so certain that's going to happen?"

Rìona hunched in on herself, shrinking even further from him. "I just... have a bad feeling about how this is all going to play out."

Alistair snorted. "Don't we all?"

She flinched when his hands fell on her shoulders from behind, practically cringing for an instant, before the yearning for his touch, his comfort, made her sag against him. His arms encircled her and Rìona closed her eyes, awash in despair too deep even for tears.

"Please don't ask me to let you go," he whispered into her hair. "Not now. I can't. Give me until the war is over. We'll announce our betrothal today, but we won't marry until after the archdemon is slain. That way, the Landsmeet knows I intended you to be my queen if I fall, and you can act with the assumption of my authority. And afterward... if you decide you would rather stay with Zevran, or whatever, we'll find a way to break it off. Just let me have these few weeks with you before we march off to war."

She turned in his arms, burying her face against his chest. "It's not because of Zevran, I swear to you, my love. I just would rather you not be too reliant upon the idea of having me beside you. Frankly, if I could have one wish above all others right now, it would be that you would find a way to reconcile with Zevran. I could rest easier, if I knew you'd have someone to comfort you if—"

"Stop saying that! You're _not_ going to die."

"Alistair, talk to him, please."

She felt his head shake, his chin brushing the top of her head. "I can't. Not yet. Maybe someday, but not now. Forget politics. Forget what motivations he did or didn't have. He infected her with the Blight-sickness. We're Grey Wardens, Rìona. How can you dismiss that so easily?"

Rìona drew back far enough to face him, her expression brittle. "She tried to take my child, Alistair. The Void can have her, for all I care."

"I know, and there are moments when I feel the same way, but... You've always been the first one to speak about mercy, love."

"I can't. Not about this. Speaking with her... I realized Anora was a woman of more feeling than I ever gave her credit for. I know I wronged her, in many ways. But I can't forgive what she would have done. If that makes me a hypocrite, so be it."

Alistair nodded glumly. "I understand."

"But you won't forgive him."

"It's not about forgiveness. I just—I don't know how to feel about what he's done. It's not even about _him_, really. Everything within me knows it was wrong, and yet... I completely understand why he did it. A horrible part of me was even glad. I don't know if I want to be a man who can feel that way, who could be _pleased_ about such a thing." Sighing, Alistair drew away. "There's no time for this. We have to get ready to go. Will you—can I—? Am I going to find myself humiliated if I go ahead and announce our betrothal to the Landsmeet?"

Gently, Rìona laid a hand alongside his beloved face, cupping the curve of his jaw in her palm. "Go ahead. Until we march to war."

"Maker help us all," he murmured fervently and pressed a kiss into her palm. 

* * *

"Perhaps it would be best if I go," Zevran murmured that night in their bedchamber. Tomorrow, Rìona would be relocating to the palace with Ella and her wet-nurse, though she had made it clear that the rest of their companions were free to use the Cousland manor house as their base of operations. In addition to being spacious enough to accommodate them all, it had the virtue of being within accessible distance of the palace. The servants Arl Bryland lent them had done a fine job of restoring the house to a more serviceable condition, and so it made sense for their companions to lodge there until what was left of the royal army was ready to depart Denerim. "This is not how I meant it to be, when I wished for you and Alistair to wed..."

"Please don't," Rìona whispered. "I've never wanted to hold you to anything against your wishes, my love, but I need your promise that you'll stay. If something happens to me, I want you there to look out for Ella..."

"_Querida,_" Zevran's voice was softly chiding. "Nothing will happen to you. I will see to it."

"Stay for Ella. And for Alistair, too. Even if he can't admit it now, he needs you."

"And what of you?" he asked, stroking a lock of her hair back from her face.

Rìona smiled wistfully, leaning into the touch. "Always."

Zevran drew a deep breath and released it slowly, nodding once. "I will stay until after the archdemon is slain, that I promise. Afterward... we shall see."

Tomorrow she would move to the palace, and she would no longer have this access to Zevran. Alistair may have said he would not force her to choose, but the need for discretion and simple logistics made it impossible to be with Zevran any longer from now until the army left Denerim. And so, she let him draw her to the bed, let him make love to her with an urgency that bordered on violence.

He did not wear his turmoil on his face; no trace of it clouded his eyes. But it came through in his touch, in bites and hard hands which grasped her hair to jerk her into another kiss. Rìona was glad for it. It masked her own desperation nicely.

It ached, not to get up in the night and reclaim Ella from Aeda, but she forced herself to lay there beside Zevran, itching to rise, to at least check on the babe. But it was better, if Ella relied upon another for comfort, nurturing, and the sort of constant maternal presence Rìona desperately longed to be. It would be less of an adjustment for the babe, then, when Rìona was no longer there.

It became somewhat easier once she moved to the palace, for there was so very much to do. Preparing the royal army to march was a massive undertaking, largely spearheaded by Arl Eamon and Alistair. At Rìona's gentle urging, Alistair promoted Loghain's lieutenant, Ser Cauthrien, to act as his general. She brought to the endeavor the military experience Alistair and Eamon lacked.

Though huge darkspawn raids had spread throughout the southern and western regions of the Bannorn, the main body of the horde was still in the Hinterlands south off the West Road, and boxed in on the east by Southron Hills. And so the army would march west, toward Redcliffe, slaying the raiding parties and driving them back into the south out of the once-fertile farmlands of the Bannorn. As they did so, the Dalish would join the army in small bands from isolated clans. They would collect the mages of the Circle Tower when they reached Lake Calenhad and then rendezvous with the dwarves of Orzammar at Redcliffe to prepare for a single concentrated drive at the body of the horde in the south.

Most of the weeks it took to prepare the army to march were spent figuring out where the provisions would come from. It was a truism, after all, that an army marched on its stomach. Between the refugee situation, and the steady loss of fertile farmland to the Blight over the course of the growing season this past year, Ser Cauthrien was concerned that the army would be in no condition to fight by the time they were ready for the final campaign. Fortunately, with the Landsmeet now united behind Alistair, harvest duties to the Crown were beginning to trickle in from the Bannorn. More would hopefully be collected as the army progressed west, preferably without the heavy-handed tactics Loghain had applied to demand levies of supplies.

The royal army would be supplemented by the mercenaries Loghain and Howe had brought to Denerim, who saw the profit of transferring the allegiance they sold to the new king. This would have the benefit of both increasing the fighting force Alistair would lead and also decreasing the burden upon Denerim's resources.

Rìona was to abide in Denerim for the time being, trying to disperse some of the masses of refugees on Denerim's doorstep to the cities of the north. Amaranthine. Highever. Waking Sea. It would be no mean feat with winter coming on fast. Many would no doubt die on the journey, but they would also die of starvation and exposure outside the city gates. From the northern ports, ships would be dispatched seeking urgent aid in the form of foodstores and relief supplies from Orlais, the Free Marches and Antiva. In Denerim, she would conscript the merchant vessels in Denerim harbor into the navy to carry refugees from Ferelden's shores at a more reasonable fee than the exorbitant prices many of the captains had been charging, with the promise of future recompense in the form of reduced port and docking fees once the Blight was over. As she did so, she would appoint an Arl of Denerim and work with him to make ready to turn the management of Denerim over to him entirely.

Once that was accomplished and travel across the Bannorn made safe, Rìona and a small force of the Royal Guard would hasten, traveling light and on swift steeds, to join the rest of the army at Redcliffe for the final assault on the horde. Alistair had not liked that; he would rather Rìona remain in Denerim for the duration. Still, he had been unable to argue against the fact that, as a Grey Warden, her place was with the army when they finally marched against the archdemon.

She would be there, at the last. Which was the only moment when her presence would matter. She might not be a general or even a soldier, but she could be the tainted body positioned to make the final blow, if Riordan failed.

One of her first acts in trying to set Denerim to rights was to dismiss the captain of the city guard, who was Howe's appointee and who had allowed the recruitment of incompetents for guardsmen and the misdeeds of Howe's hand-picked thugs to flourish. In his place, she promoted Sergeant Kylon, who set about instituting a new discipline in the ranks of the city guard. He immediately began recruiting from among the refugees and even out of the Alienage to bolster his forces. He chose well; able-bodied men who were capable and not inclined to idleness.

He also instituted a rather brilliant, if harsh, plan for dealing with miscreants, based on the old tribal custom of shunning. Rather than levying a fine they would never pay, or imprisoning them and thus adding to the number of people Denerim's thin resources had to feed and shelter, instead, he began to exile them from the city. Criminals caught in the act were summarily deposited outside the walls, and those who were merely accused were put to trial with the same sentence imposed if they were found guilty. Therefore, lawbreakers forfeited the protection of the city walls, the guard, and the food and shelter to be found within the city.

Despite her sorrow over what she knew was to come, in some ways it was a time of contentment for Rìona. This, she realized, was what she was meant to do. Even beyond her training as a courtesan, she was trained to administer, to manage. She was good at it. The crushing sense of pressure and obligation that had weighed her down so often while she was trying to lead her company as they gathered their army was gone. She felt comfortable, well within her stride even when matters were challenging and seemingly impossible.

What a pity she had come to realize that only now.

For all that Alistair had pleaded with her to give him these final weeks, they saw very little of one another. Rìona often crawled into an empty bed and fell into an exhausted sleep long before Alistair came to her bedchamber and joined her. Too tired even for dreams of the archdemon to penetrate, they woke at first light to make their way to their separate obligations, to war councils and correspondence and audiences, only to collapse into bed the next night equally exhausted. He never slept in his own chambers, however. He always came to her and curled around her in his sleep.

She worried anew at what he would do for comfort when she was gone.

Their companions came to the palace a number of times for briefings and conferences. The mismatched company she had gathered would be departing with the army. They would form Alistair's honor guard, as was only appropriate. Rìona was relieved that Alistair would still have them at his back. Over the months of the travel, they had all established a rhythm, fighting together, an understanding of how to work together. It good that Alistair would be amongst them, rather than strangers with whom he didn't have that same sort of rapport.

Only Conall would remain with Rìona in Denerim. It was a lonely prospect, but necessary. Still, on the final day before the army was due to depart, she made a point of clearing her schedule to attend one of these sorts of briefings, though it actually had nothing to do with her, so that she might have a chance to bid them farewell.

As Eamon and Ser Cauthrien and their various advisers and lieutenants filed out, Rìona approached each of her companions in turn and spoke a soft word with them. Oghren, she hadn't gotten to know all that well. She hadn't been there in the Deep Roads when they went looking for Branka, and afterward, she had been caught up in Alistair and Zevran and Ella and politics. She hadn't perhaps given herself enough time to know him, but still she spoke with him, and told him it was an honor to have traveled with him, and entreated him to look after Alistair.

Shale, too, had become more Alistair's companion than Rìona's own, during their time in the Deep Roads together, bound together in camaraderie all those long weeks in the dark. But it was Rìona whom Sten, reunited with his sword, called _kadan._ His respect meant more than Rìona could say, particularly because she knew it came in spite of his utter inability to understand her and she, him.

Wynne, whose often infuriatingly intrusive advice had somehow become the star by which Rìona fixed her course, was harder to bid farewell to. She enfolded Rìona in a gentle embrace and assured her that, Maker willing, they would see each other soon. The childless mother and the motherless girl; they had formed a bond, the two of them. Never again would Rìona have that maternal knee to lean her head upon, nor the stern advice to caution her when she was close to forgetting her duty in the midst of her own self-interest.

And then there was Leliana, whose soft-spoken support throughout had been invaluable. Without Leliana, Ella would never have come to birth. She would have been lost that night in the mountains near Haven after the fight with the high dragon. Time and again, in small ways and great, she had been there when Rìona needed another subtle political mind, or just a sympathetic confidante. Rìona had to close her eyes against the impulse for tears as she enfolded Leliana in an embrace for a long moment, swaying slightly back and forth.

"It's hard to imagine you won't be with us anymore," Leliana murmured, her normally flawlessly modulated voice catching slightly.

"Only for a time, my friend," Rìona said softly, stroking a lock of hair back from her face. "When the end comes, we'll face it together."

"Are you all right?" Concerned, Leliana touched Rìona's cheek, and her troubled frown deepened when Rìona flinched away. "The way you talk about what's to come, it frightens me. Do you remember what I told you about my dream? About the darkness, and how I stood on the peak and watched it coming, consuming everything? You look like I felt, the moment before I fell."

Desperate to confide, and yet unable to say anything that would make a difference, words bottled up in Rìona's throat, sticking there, choking her. Instead, she hugged Leliana one last time, quickly, tightly, and kissed her cheek before turning away.

Which left only Zevran, approaching her with a face that was still and unreadable. Across the room, Alistair's eyes followed him, full of sorrow and yearning. Strangely, she felt no need to bid him farewell; they had done that the final night before she moved into the palace. And so instead, she merely touched his shoulder as he passed, and murmured, "You will take care of each other, won't you?"

"I will try my best, _querida,_" he replied solemnly, and left.

Alistair came to her chamber early that night, and made love to her for hours despite their mutual weariness. Tenderness transformed to desperation as the night wore on, creeping inexorably toward dawn and the inevitable parting. When next they saw each other, they would be together at the head of an army about to charge straight into the maw of the archdemon.

As the first gray light began to brighten the windows of her bedchamber, she reared up over Alistair, her thighs straining as she moved up and down upon him, her back arched and her head thrown back. Alistair's hands rode her sweat-damp skin from the dip of her waist up along her ribs to the swell of her breasts, and back down again, rising and falling as she rode him, fighting desperately to ascend one final peak. She sobbed for breath and trembled with exhaustion when finally she collapsed onto the slick skin of his chest, enveloped in his arms and biting her tongue until she tasted blood to keep from telling him everything.

Instead, she told him that she loved him, would always love him. She tried not to make it sound like a good-bye.

Only a few hours later, she stood at the gates of Denerim, surrounded by the cacophony of the roaring populace cheering the army off to fight the darkspawn. She smiled bravely as Alistair gave her hand one final, courtly kiss, before he mounted his steed and took his place at the head of the royal army, riding off to war.


	62. Chapter Sixty Two: Consequences

A pavilion. They had him sleeping in a sodding pavilion.

He hadn't really had time to attend to arrangements for his own accommodations in those final weeks preparing to march from Denerim. Perhaps he'd simply assumed they would be the same as they always had on the road, this past year. Eamon had apparently had other ideas. The silk tent was nowhere near as sumptuous as Cailan's had been at Ostagar, but there was enough room inside it for a table around which he and his advisers gathered with maps for consultations, and a curtain partitioned off the end, which hosted his thick, comfortable, roomy pallet.

He couldn't escape the idea that he would have dearly loved such comfort when it had been only their small party traveling. The idea of sharing that pallet with Rìona, or Zevran, or both, sent a pang of longing through him that made it difficult to sleep at night, even if the nightmares about the archdemon hadn't been becoming more persistent. He was keenly aware of the fact that Zevran was only yards away, in a much smaller tent he shared with Sten. That awareness wasn't doing his sleep any favors, either.

For the most part, Zev seemed to be keeping to himself. He and Alistair never spoke, but he was always there, somewhere behind Alistair in the vanguard of the army, as they made their way day by inexorable day across the Bannorn, driving back the encroaching arms of the darkspawn horde, turning them south. Alistair heard Zevran in battle, when they engaged the darkspawn raiding parties, mocking their enemies as he slew them with his customary verve. In a way he had never done before, Alistair could now see that in the heat of a fight, Zevran truly came alive. For all that he was an assassin, whose skill lay in the administration of quiet, subtle death, it was in the open fight, staring death in the teeth and daring it to claim him, where Zevran flourished.

In that way—as with so many other unexpected things—they were alike.

Being apart from Zevran no longer felt like a much-needed respite to sort out his conflicted feelings about the way Zevran had killed Anora. It felt like stupidity, willful stupidity, and a waste of rapidly dwindling time. But Alistair didn't know how to cross the distance he had created, now that it was there. Discretion meant he couldn't go to Zevran, and Zev _wouldn't_ come to him without an invitation, that much was clear. But inviting Zevran to his tent felt wrong, also. Presumptuous, perhaps, or maybe even a seedy assertion of royal prerogative. If the king summoned an elf into his tent at night, there would be talk of the sort he really didn't want there to be about Zevran.

But it ached, to lie there on his large, empty pallet at night with Zevran so near, and yet out of his reach.

The march across the Bannorn was brilliantly successful. The might of the darkspawn lay in their unimaginably massive numbers, not in their prowess. Even the largest raiding parties were easy pickings for a well-trained force, and whatever else Alistair's opinion of Loghain, the man had kept the remainder of the royal army in top form. Ser Cauthrien was ridiculously competent and the army had little trouble routing even the largest bands of darkspawn and driving them south.

It took over two months to drive the darkspawn out of the western Bannorn and reach Redcliffe Village. By the time they had done so it was full winter once again, and the army was being threatened by the effects of the cold and the limited food supplies they had been able to collect on their way across the Bannorn. Fortunately, Eamon's Orlesian in-laws had come through with a caravan of foodstuffs, and Redcliffe Village had been hard at work all year laying in stores, which meant the army would be well-provisioned for the final push south.

First Day was less than a week away when they arrived in Redcliffe. In consultation with Eamon and Ser Cauthrien, Alistair agreed that a small reprieve, and modest celebration, would do wonders for morale, and so they would remain in Redcliffe until after First Day before beginning the final campaign.

Inwardly, Alistair felt uneasy with the decision, no matter how much sense it seemed to make. The taint within his blood, his inner sense of the darkspawn, made him restless. His nightmares were getting worse, and for some reason the prospect of moving south toward the horde felt _wrong._ He didn't understand it. When he had been in the Deep Roads, moving toward the archdemon and the horde, it had felt _right_, as though something within him yearned to join the horde. Why should it feel wrong, now that he was on the verge of doing just that?

On the eve before First Day, the casks of ale and wine allotted to the army camped in the valley outside Redcliffe were unrationed. It was bizarre, the way dwarves, elves, mages and soldiers all mingled. They each had their own enclaves within the encampment, and yet as the spirits flowed, the boundaries became less defined. Only the Dalish, who did not celebrate First Day, kept themselves apart. As evening fell, Alistair toured the camp, putting in an appearance, mingling, talking to the men and hearing their concerns and hopes, before returning to the castle for the modest feast Lady Isolde had arranged.

He drank rather too much wine himself, feeling restless, frustrated and lonely, even in the midst of all these people, and retired early rather than stay up for the midnight hour to arrive and usher in the new year. He awoke only a few hours later, the archdemon's roar still echoing in his head, calling to him. Not south. _Not south_. Maker, where, then?

Anxiously, he rose from his bed and, shivering in the chill of the room, drew on a pair of breeches and stoked the banked fire. He went to the window and looked out, across the sliver of the lake that separated the island which housed the castle from the village proper. Torches and bonfires still glowed in the darkness of the valley beyond the village, which housed the army encampment, and no doubt would do so well into the night. Strangely, despite the fact that it was winter, something about the encampment looked warmer and more inviting than the castle presently felt.

Growling with frustration, Alistair pulled on a linen shirt and reached for his boots, intending to take a walk around the castle until he stopped feeling so damned restless. But just as he was sitting down to don his boots, a rap sounded upon his door.

"Riordan." Alistair couldn't help the note of surprise that crept into his voice to find the senior Warden standing outside his chamber.

"Your Majesty." Riordan gave a respectful, if brief, bow of his head, the courtesy somewhat belied by the twitchy way his eyes moved. Unless he missed his guess, Alistair wasn't the only one who had just awoken from a nightmare about the archdemon.

"Please. Just Alistair," he corrected quickly, frowning. Riordan had kept to himself a great deal during the campaign, often disappearing for days or even weeks to scout amongst the bands of darkspawn, returning with efficient reports about their numbers and activities. His activities had been a large part of the reason the campaign to purge the darkspawn from the Bannorn had been so successful, but it had not provided Alistair with an opportunity to get to know the more experienced Grey Warden, as he would have preferred to do.

"May I come in, Alistair? We have important matters to discuss." Riordan frowned, looking both grave and anxious. Alistair nodded and gestured Riordan inside, and poured them both goblets of spiced wine from the flagon a servant had left to warm upon the hearth.

"Bad dreams?" Alistair asked with a wry twist, seating himself in one of the large, comfortable chairs before the hearth.

"We cannot march south," Riordan announced without preamble after drinking deeply of his wine. "While we have been in the north, progressing west, the bulk of the horde has been far south of us, moving east. By the time we reach the Hinterlands, only stragglers will remain."

Alistair tipped his goblet, taking a deep draught of the mulled wine, then nodded slowly. "That explains a lot. But why weren't we aware of this before?"

Riordan shook his head. "I did not scout south far enough to see what they were doing. With so few Grey Wardens here, I could not risk the horde sensing my presence in numbers too great to evade. Not until we had located the archdemon. If not for tonight's dream, we might still not know, except for a vague feeling of something being amiss as we moved south."

Again, Alistair nodded. "I know tonight's dream made my... sense of something being amiss... stronger, but I wasn't left with any sure knowledge, such as you seem to have. Is that just experience, then, or did you get something out of it that I didn't?"

"You cannot understand the archdemon then?" Riordan asked with an inquiring lift of his brow. Alistair shook his head, and the senior Warden nodded. "Not all Grey Wardens can do it, but I am able to. Tonight, it became very clear that the archdemon is commanding the horde east, Alistair. I believe they intend to attack Denerim."

"_What?_" Alistair didn't notice as he missed the table when attempting to set his goblet down. It clattered to the floor, the sound and the wine soaking into the rug completely insignificant as he shot to his feet. "Rìona is alone there with practically no defenses! I've got the whole bloody army _here!_"

Riordan nodded gravely. "Yes. The archdemon can sense us, is aware of us. He knows we are divided. He intends to cut her off from us, destroy her, and then fight us from a fortified position within the city. In the process, the horde also gains access to a massive population to corrupt, the survivors of which would then be enslaved as ghouls, or worse, broodmothers."

"Oh, Maker," Alistair groaned, pacing, grinding the heels of his hands into his eyes as he turned a helpless circle, struggling to quell his panic and think rationally. His mind wasn't making it easy as every thought screamed about Rìona and Ella, practically helpless before on onslaught heading toward them.

"All right. I'll rouse Eamon and Cauthrien, tell them to start preparing the army to march at first light. Maker, of all the days for half my army to be hungover. Depending on the weather, we're looking at a three-week march to Denerim. How long until the horde gets there, do you imagine?"

"I cannot say for certain," Riordan said with a frown and a shrug. "They must move out of the deep south and skirt the Southron Hills to the Brecilian Passage. They will be pillaging and destroying as they go, which will slow their advance. We must do everything we can to get there before they become entrenched in the city. We must be with Rìona when the archdemon attacks, or she will die in vain and we haven't enough Wardens to make up for the loss. She does not have the forces to defeat it."

"Rìona's no fool. She won't try to confront the archdemon without reinforcements. She'll be focused on evacuating the city, trying to save as many people as possible. She's an archer. She'll defend from atop the city walls rather than try to fight the dragon."

Riordan gave him a strange look. "She knows what she must do. If she thinks she sees an opportunity to assault the archdemon, she will take it, whether we are there or not."

"That would be insane!" Alistair protested. "She knows she's not effective in that sort of combat. She might send the city guard and the small company of the army I left behind to escort her to Redcliffe against the archdemon, but she won't try to take it on herself."

And then it was Riordan's turn to groan, rubbing his brow with his fingers and looking unspeakably weary. "She did not tell you," he said flatly, when he looked up again, a note of sympathy in his voice.

Alistair stopped his frantic pacing, a sudden terror freezing him in place. His heart thundered in his chest, his breath short and tight, as he looked at Riordan.

"_Tell me what?_" 

* * *

Later, Alistair would have no memory of rushing to Ser Cauthrien's chamber and unceremoniously pounding on the door to command her to muster the army, or then rousing Eamon to wake the village and put everyone to work packing the foodstores and provisions which would be sent along with the army. Fortunately, since they had actually intended to begin their march south only a day later, most of the logistical work was already completed. It would be a scramble, but the army would be ready. It wouldn't, however, happen by first light, no matter how much Alistair snarled and snapped and railed against the delay. Finally, realizing his desperate impatience was hindering more than it was helping, he stormed off to his chambers to try to get some rest in preparation for the day's march.

Only once he had closed his door did he realize he was not alone.

"It is true?" Zevran asked softly, turning from where he waited by the fire. "The horde, it moves on Denerim?"

Alistair nodded, hanging his head for a moment, wearily, before glancing up at Zevran. That flawless, impassive, inhumanly calm mask Zev had worn since Denerim was nowhere to be seen. There was only naked concern, and in the face of it, under the circumstances, Alistair couldn't bring himself to care about anything that had gone before. All that mattered was that Zevran was here, and that he, of all people, knew and shared Alistair's fear.

"It's worse than that," Alistair replied, crossing to the mantle to get another much-needed goblet of wine. "She means to die."

"What?" Zevran's eyes sharpened, his concern spiking into something keener, more dangerous.

And so, Alistair told him, holding nothing back. It didn't matter than he was revealing secrets known only to the Grey Wardens. Nothing mattered, except that Zevran understood what Rìona intended.

"She didn't tell me, because she knew what I would do," Alistair muttered, concluding his explanation and then draining his goblet in a single draught. "She intends to take that blow herself, if she can."

Zevran nodded silently, and his stillness, his very lack of reaction, told Alistair all he needed to know about just how afraid Zev was. As they had been the night Ella was born, here in this very castle, they were united again in their mutual concern for the woman they both loved. It was almost as if the nearly five months since Ella's birth hadn't happened.

Alistair sighed heavily. "If we can get ahead of the horde, so that they're not between us and Rìona, I intend to send you ahead into the city. Do whatever you have to do. Tie her up and throw her into a wardrobe if you must. Just keep her away from the archdemon."

Something in Zevran's eyes hardened at that, almost angrily. "So, if this Riordan falls, you will die, then?"

Nodding, Alistair looked down into his empty goblet. "So I'm given to understand."

Zevran looked away, and murmured, "So, who shall hold you in a wardrobe?"

"Zev—"

"How am I to make that choice?" Zevran demanded, looking back to Alistair, his gaze as piercing as a gimlet.

Alistair shrugged, his shoulders heavy with grief. "It's Rìona," he said softly, as if that explained everything.

Almost so soft as to be inaudible, Zevran murmured, "And you think I would mourn your loss any less than hers?"

Suddenly Alistair wanted to weep, his throat tightening, as remorse for the way he had pushed Zevran away flooded through him. It didn't seem to matter, anymore, what Zev had done to Anora. Nothing mattered, no ideal, no principle. He no longer had any certitude, only this frenzied fear that his days were finite and every opportunity was unspeakably precious. He couldn't die leaving Zevran in doubt of how he felt for him.

And so, as he had done on that desperate, needy night in the Deep Roads, he grabbed Zevran and kissed him, and the burden on his soul eased somewhat at Zevran's response. There was no anger, no reserve, no hesitation. Zevran's hands came up to the back of Alistair's head and drew him in as his body pressed closer, pliant and welcoming. What had happened before was forgotten and all that mattered was _now._

They did not make love, in those pre-dawn hours. It didn't seem necessary and desire somehow felt inappropriate to the moment. Alistair was weary and Zevran's body beside his helped calm the tumbling of his mind enough so that he could sleep for a short time, until the servants rapped upon the chamber door, bearing water for his bath and food to break his fast before the day's march.

But Zevran was there the next night, appearing silently and without warning in Alistair's spacious tent after Alistair's advisers had left and his manservant had retired. Suddenly, somehow, he was just there, appearing out of the shadows and slipping into the silken enclosure like a wraith. With a muttered prayer of thanks Alistair returned his eager embrace, before pushing Zevran urgently down upon the soft pallet.

The army made good time, marching eastward at speed. The darkspawn horde was apparently taking the Brecilian Passage to get around the Southron Hills, which was both a curse and a boon. It would make the distance the horde must travel to reach Denerim shorter, but it also meant the army encountered almost no resistance as they rushed toward the capital.

During the final week of the crossing, the advance scouts began to return with troubling news. The bannorn closest to Denerim were being overrun. The arling of South Reach had already fallen, and the army would not get there in time to save Dragon's Peak. The good news, if such a thing even existed, was that it looked like the horde might reach Denerim only a day or two in advance of the army. With the city gates closed, it would take the horde time to assail the city proper. They just might make it in time.

The reports did not prepare Alistair for the reality. On the previous march west, much of the wreckage they had seen had been weeks or months old, charred and abandoned husks of buildings, and corpses already long-since gone to decay. Now, carnage was fresh. They heard the new lamenting of survivors for those who had just been killed, and the hopelessness of the people who had lost everything they possessed in the world. They were forced to deliver mercy to masses slowly dying of the corruption—and the ones who had already turned to ghouls.

The tents and clothing and bedding took on the rank odor of burning flesh from the pyres they erected from the timbers that formed the skeletons of ransacked homes.

Alistair had expected the men and women of his army to quail in horror at the necessity of killing not darkspawn, but other humans. Instead, it seemed to imbue them with a grim determination to end this and make the sacrifice worth it.

They made camp just east of Dragon's Peak, less than a day's march from Denerim. Tomorrow, the battle would begin in earnest. It was late when Alistair finally dismissed his advisers and let his manservant remove his armor. Eating his supper of dried, smoked fish rolls and hard-baked bread washed down by raspy wine, he paced about his tent, unsettled—as he had been in the Deep Roads—by how _right_ it felt to be this close to the horde and the archdemon.

He stepped outside the tent, not wandering far, but merely stretching his legs as he waited for the camp to be calm. He knew Zevran would not come until there was no one around to gossip. It would be a while still; on this, the night before battle, there was a great deal of bustle and preparation. Sighing and no less restless than he had been before his walk, he turned and opened his tent flap, only to duck as a hawk swooped over his head and into the confines of the tent.

"Hey!" Alistair began to shout, but then he stopped. He had only an instant of awareness, a tingling of his senses that told him the Veil was being touched, in which to brace himself and begin to summon the energy to smite, when the hawk settled on the floor and blurred, resolving itself into Morrigan.

Angrily, he again began to summon the holy energy with which to smite her, but her words stopped him.

"You may smite or slay me, but if you do, either you or your beloved will die. If you hear me out, you may yet be saved."

"After what you tried to do to Rìona, why would I ever listen to you?" Alistair demanded angrily.

Morrigan offered him a tight smile. "Because I know what happens when you confront the archdemon. I know a Grey Warden must die, and I know Rìona intends that it should be she. But, if you are willing to listen, I have a way out. So... will you stay your hand?" 

* * *

_I will remain for one hour, in which time you will make your decision. Then I will be gone, and your chance lost forever._

With Morrigan's final words echoing in his mind, Alistair stepped outside his tent once more, walking away blindly, seeking to put some distance between himself and the woman he despised.

The woman who offered him the only hope he had yet found.

He sensed, rather than heard, Zevran emerge from the shadows behind him.

"You heard?" Alistair asked, turning to face him.

Zevran nodded, and held up a dagger, the blade coated with some sort of glistening oil. "Magebane, yes? I was preparing to slip into the tent behind her when she began to speak her proposal."

"I don't suppose I need to ask what you think I should do."

"You know you do not."

Alistair shuddered with revulsion at the thought of what he was being asked to do. "It's not just that I despise her. If that were the only problem, I wouldn't care."

Zevran crossed his arms over his chest, regarding Alistair with a hint of that cold reserve he used when he made himself not care. "Then what is the problem?"

Alistair stared in disbelief. "Maker! You have to ask? _This_ is why she tried to cause Rìona to lose Ella, even tried to manufacture Rìona's death. And now that Ella is no longer an obstacle to her plans, she expects me to give it to her!"

"Principle is all well and good," Zevran said with a touch of impatience. "But will you die to thwart her plans? Or condemn our Rìona to death?"

"You say that as if her plans are trivial! Zev, you heard what she wants. A child, carrying the Grey Warden taint, to absorb the uncorrupted soul of the Old God when the archdemon dies. Morrigan. _With control of an Old God._" Anxiously, Alistair tugged hard upon his braided queue. "I'm not sure I can imagine a more terrifying prospect. And she says she'll teach him to 'respect that from which he comes.' As if she could teach something she has absolutely no idea how to _do!_"

Zevran waved his hand in a dismissive gesture. "The fate of the world, unknowable things which may carry consequences decades down the line, these do not concern me. I care only for that which benefits or threatens those who are mine, those whom..." He shook his head. "It is a worthy goal, ending this Blight. It makes the world safe for our Ella. It matters to you, and to her, and so it matters to me. Now, I see only that there is a chance that you may live, when you would have otherwise died. I cannot place the same importance upon the rest as you seem to."

Alistair hung his head, sighing. "I can't be that cavalier about it. I wish I could." After a moment, he looked up again, his eyes intent on Zevran's. "Someday, Ella will have to live in the same world as this child of mine Morrigan wants to conceive, this child with the soul of an Old God. If you're looking for a reason to be personally invested."

Zevran looked as if he might argue, but then he acknowledged the point with a bow of his head. Silence fell between them for a long moment, until Alistair spoke again.

"If I do this, it's because I want to live. Because I don't want to lose Rìona. Because I want to stay with you, and her, and Ella. Because I want some happiness—not a lot, just a little—for us after all we've lost and sacrificed to get here." He sighed again, struggling still to bring some order to his churning thoughts. "I'm not sure any of that justifies the potential consequences. I'm not sure anything could."

Zevran nodded, silently, gravely. Alistair looked at him for a long, searching moment, then turned away.

"I know what you want me to do. But I need this to be my choice."

"Of course. I will return later."

Alistair did not hear him walk away. He stood out there in the cold, surrounded by, and yet apart from, the pre-battle preparations, aware that his time was running out. Finally, unspeakably weary, he turned upon leaden feet to return to his tent. Just as he reached the flap, however, he froze, overcome by a thought more terrible than all the thoughts that had gone before. It paralyzed him, as he stood there, unable to take that final step inside. Not until he heard Morrigan make an impatient sound did he finally break his paralysis, and with a grim face, lift the flap to her his answer.


	63. Chapter Sixty Three: Calculus

Fort Drakon was a different place from when Rìona had been incarcerated there just weeks before. Despite the scarcity of men and women for the city and palace guard, Rìona's first order of business in setting the city to rights had been a purge of Howe's remaining men. Fortunately, some of them were replaced by men from the Dragon's Peak Bannorn when she decided to appoint Bann Sighard's son Oswyn as the Arl of Denerim. It wouldn't be an official appointment until after after Alistair's coronation, but Oswyn would be performing the functions as the _de facto_ arl in the meantime to fill the void. It seemed a fitting acknowledgment for a man who had been imprisoned and tortured for trying to hunt down proof of Loghain and Howe's treason. Oswyn had been groomed to take over his father's bannorn, and he was a capable manager; he and Rìona quickly fell into an easy rhythm of working together to try to restore order to the capital city.

Most of the city guard were needed to keep order in the streets and to assist with the relocation of refugees to the northern cities. A great many of Howe's, now unemployed, men had joined the gangs of thugs and thieves who had operated freely under their supervision. Guard-Captain Kylon's shunning scheme culled some of the worst of the lot, but with food and lodgings at a premium within the city, maintaining the peace was beginning to look like an increasingly futile endeavor.

With small detachments of guardsmen to escort them, equipped with what limited rations the city could spare, bands of refugees began departing the sprawling encampment at the foot of the city's walls for the northern ports. The teeming masses outside the city gates began to thin, somewhat. Sanitation and danger of contagion became less of an issue, as well as crime within the refugee encampment, but the refugee situation remained the city's biggest problem by far.

Thus it was that the very limited garrison now housed in Fort Drakon was comprised of men gathered from the city guard and on loan from Dragon's Peak. Fortunately, not many men were needed to man the prison now. Many of the prisoners had been political dissidents incarcerated for speaking out against Howe's brutalities and Loghain's usurpation, or for defending the Grey Wardens, and the release of those prisoners had been accomplished at the same time Howe's men were ousted. With the cells emptied, the prison could function with a very limited number of men.

A number of that handful of guards were dedicated to keeping watch over a single prisoner, the very man she was there to see.

Unlike she and Alistair during their brief stay, the former regent was not housed in an open cell in the common prison, but in a private chamber under guard. Though it had pained him to do so, Alistair had been very firm in his directive that, until his trial, Loghain was to be treated with all the courtesy due his rank and record of service to the realm. It was a shrewd bit of statesmanship, and one for which Rìona had been quite proud of him despite her own hatred for Loghain. In doing so, Alistair demonstrated that he was a just king, and not prone to vindictiveness or spite.

Rìona had been happy to ignore Loghain's presence in the prison, until she received a missive requesting an audience. With Conall and the captain of the palace guard, plus a half-dozen of his best men, at her back, she went to the prison to honor the request as a courtesy. The fact that she was doing so left a bitter taste in her mouth, but it would be churlish to do otherwise.

She found him pacing his chambers like a caged animal.

"You want me to do what?" Rìona asked in disbelief when he issued his bluntly-worded request.

"It's very simple," he said with a touch of impatience, as though she were incapable of understanding basic concepts. "I'm a valuable resource and I'm not accustomed to sitting idle. It's driving me mad. You're undermanned; you need all the help you can get, and I'm serving nothing and no one cooped up in here. Release me. Allow me to help. When the crisis is over, you may imprison me again to stand trial."

Rìona stared for a long moment, and then began to laugh. It was not the cultured laugh of the courtesan she'd learned under her mother's tutelage, nor was there any real humor in it. It was a bitter thing, touched with an edge of hysteria.

"You're _already_ mad," she answered after a moment, wiping her eyes. "Quite mad, if you think I will do such a thing. The last time you made yourself useful, our king wound up dead. Shall I expect the same level of devoted service?"

He twitched, only the minutest amount, but enough so that she knew, despite his mask of arrogant annoyance, that she had scored a hit.

"Think what you like about me, it doesn't alter the facts. You've a city full of people who are about to starve or run mad. I happen know something about bringing desperate people under order, uniting them in common purpose despite desperate odds. I can be of assistance, but not from here."

Hatred welled up within her, vile and ugly. She despised herself for giving it vent, but was powerless to resist. "Yes, yes, your record of accomplishments are quite impressive, right up to the point at which you turned your mind to treason. Now it's thanks to you, and that lackey you unleashed upon my family, that those starving, desperate people haven't been managed well since the beginning. If I'm overwhelmed, it's because I'm trying to clean up the mess _you've_ made!"

Sensing her mood, Conall's hackles rose and a growl rumbled in his chest. So much, so much could be laid at his feet! She wanted to hurl the accusations at him like bolts from a ballista. Not only the deaths of her family, not only the current chaos of the city and the realm, but her own predicament. If the Grey Wardens had survived Ostagar, or if he had allowed more into the country from Orlais, she would not now be awaiting her own death. She might have a chance to live, a chance to be happy with Alistair and Zevran, a chance to be a mother to Ella and watch her grow. If Riordan failed, Loghain's treason had doomed her as surely as it had doomed Cailan.

But she couldn't say that to him. If she started, it would only end in her own hysterics. She forced herself to stop, trapping the tirade behind the gate of her teeth with a snap that nearly severed her tongue.

Loghain was staring at her, his face grave. He studied at her as he would a map of a battlefield, trying to assess her state, decipher her hidden dangers.

"Yes, I know," he said finally, speaking slowly. His tone was no longer arrogant. Indeed, his entire bearing had changed. He seemed heavier, older. Remorse colored his words. "I know that much of what burdens you is due to the mistakes I have made. I made a terrible miscalculation when I refused to believe Duncan about the danger of the Blight. Now, I have lost everything due to that mistake, even my own daughter. I seek only to rectify my errors somewhat, if I can. If you can bring yourself to trust me with that much liberty."

Why she agreed, Rìona would never know, except that it seemed spiteful not to, when she was indeed so overwhelmed. She barely slept, barely ate, was able only to visit Ella for a few minutes each morning and evening. She made Loghain her aide, and charged him with coordinating the efforts of the royal guard and the city guard so that they functioned together seamlessly, with no confusion of authority as more and more of the royal guard were loaned out to bolster the numbers of the depleted city guard. He was to report directly to her, for she found that, as odious as his presence was to her, she would much rather keep an eye on him than not. Nonetheless, she also had Kylon and the captain of the royal guard on alert to watch for any signs of seditious activity.

As the weeks passed, Maker help her, it became easier to work with him. Until she looked at him and remembered that it was because of him that she had lost everything, even her own life.

"I didn't order the deaths of your family, you know," he announced out of nowhere one afternoon, sitting across from her in her study. He had looked up to find her watching him—as she often did—as though he were a serpent ready to strike, and gave an impatient huff.

"Oh?" Rìona lifted a disdainful brow, and countered with the same argument she'd given Anora. "Howe was a coward. He would not have acted unless he was certain he had protection."

"Yes. He told me he could prevent Bryce from being an obstacle, and I agreed to leave it in his hands. I had assumed he would arrange for your father's assassination, and perhaps couple it with a smear campaign about your mother to discredit the rest of you. A sneak attack on an unguarded castle in the middle of the night, however?" Loghain frowned. "No. I hadn't anticipated that."

Rìona favored him with a tight, brittle smile. "Well, I shall be sure to keep your miscalculation in mind, the next time I wake in the night from a dream of my six year old nephew, lying in his bed with his throat slit, his mother a bloody heap on the floor beside him, or when I hear echoes of the screams of our servants being raped and murdered."

Loghain looked away, and Rìona found the victory she had won to be a hollow, bitter thing. Though it had been over a year since Highever fell, sometimes when she thought of that night, she felt trapped within it. The images in her mind made her heart thunder in her chest, and brought the coppery taste of panic to her tongue. The echoes of the screams drowned out all else until she found a way to somehow break free of the moment, repeating endlessly in her mind. She realized now, that day on the bridge at Ostagar when she had envisioned flinging herself over the parapet, it was those images, those screams, she had longed to escape.

For a while, it seemed they had faded, in Zevran or Alistair's arms, or with Ella at her breast. In times of trial and melancholy, they were worse. Now, they seemed louder than ever, since the day they had attacked Howe's estate and particularly when she looked at the man before her.

Loghain looked back to her, his face once more expressionless. "Have you given some thought to what you'll do if the horde threatens the city? You've got thousands of people pinned against the city walls, defenseless and exposed."

"Have your scouts reported back with any news of the movements of the horde?"

He shook his head. "The campaign to clear them out of the Bannorn seems to be succeeding. I imagine the king will be sending for you to join him soon, in preparation for the final assault."

Her heart contracted at the idea that soon she would leave Ella behind in Denerim, never to return. She pushed the feeling aside.

"Then why the concern over the horde assaulting Denerim?"

"Call it military intuition. You're in a poorly defended position. If they assault here, they can do massive damage in a single attack, and without the capital, Ferelden will be in chaos. Far more efficient than picking off isolated villages and farmholds."

"We're trying to clear out as many refugees as possible," Rìona said with a helpless shrug. "We haven't enough guardsmen to provide escorts, to haste the process along. I don't see what else we can do, short of a full-scale evacuation, or pulling the refugees into the city, behind the walls."

"Evacuation is the better option, though you'll have to send them on without the rations you've been sending along with the parties you've been moving forth so far. A siege is a brutal thing, and the more people you have within the walls, the sooner everyone starves." He pinned her with a hard gaze. "If it comes down to a choice of pulling the refugees into the city or barring them outside the gates, your best chance for holding out actually lies in the latter option."

Aghast, Rìona stared at him. "Leave them outside the city for the darkspawn to kill them? Are you mad?" Shaking her head, she muttered, "What am I asking? Of course you are."

"There are no good choices," he insisted mercilessly. "If you attempt to save everyone, you'll save no one. Say what you like about my choice to sell the Alienage elves to slavers, it would have gotten them out of their indefensible corner of the city, beyond the reach of the darkspawn."

Disgusted, Rìona sneered, "Yes, well, perhaps they would have rather died free than lived enslaved. Did that occur to you?"

"Without the revenue to support the army and hire mercenaries to make up for the troops we lost at Ostagar, _everyone_ would have died. This is the calculus of war, and you had best learn it if you intend to lead."

Rìona shook her head. "And what rationale did Meghren and Severen use, I wonder, when they chose to sell the elves to slavers? Do you imagine it to be any less inhuman than your own."

"You dare compare me to them?" Outraged, Loghain drew back, glaring at her. Rìona gave him a cruel smile.

"Murdering Bann Grainne in her own freehold for refusing to hand over levies of foodstores to which you had no legal right. How far a step is that to turning out freeholders from their lands for failure to pay exorbitant taxes? Hanging the men of Oswin on poles to starve to death? Maker, why not simply mount their heads on spikes outside the palace?" Coldly, she arched a mocking brow at him. "That's what a solid despot like Meghren would have done. To avoid us becoming subjects of Orlais, you would have turned us into Orlais. Truly, the irony is staggering."

"Yes, well, I'll pay for my crimes both real and imagined, soon enough," Loghain said, rising with a sardonic bow. "Flogging me for them at present hardly seems like an efficient use of your time or mine. With your leave, I'll retire and start laying out plans for the evacuation of the city, if it becomes necessary."

Rìona gave him a tight-lipped, dismissive nod and Loghain rose to leave. When he was gone, she found herself at a loose end for once, with nothing to occupy her time. Shaking off the morose tension her discussion with Loghain had left upon her, Rìona left her study at a brisk walk, intent upon spending her unexpected free time with Ella. She rushed up the stairs to the nursery suite, her skirts swishing around her legs, nearly tripping her until she slowed her eager pace.

In the nursery, she found Aeda suckling her own son, while the maidservant who assisted Aeda in caring for the babes was just lifting a squalling Ella from her cradle, changing her wet linens with practiced hands. With a joyous smile, Rìona held out her arms for Ella once she was properly swaddled again.

Ella stiffened the moment she was in Rìona's arms, a fretful expression on her sweet face. Her bottom lip protruded, quivering anxiously as she began to squirm, turning her head this way and that.

Shushing her, Rìona carried her to a chair and sat with her, snuggling Ella against her shoulder, rubbing her back soothingly as she crooned into Ella's hair. Yet still the babe would not be placated, twisting and moving, refusing to relax and snuggle in Rìona's arms. Her small, discontented sounds became cries.

"Perhaps she's hungry, my lady," Aeda suggested, handing her son off to the nursery maid. She rose to collect Ella, and Rìona handed her over.

Immediately, Ella's fussing stilled, as Aeda gathered her close and carried her to another chair to nurse her.

Stricken, Rìona watched, an ache burgeoning in her heart. She felt ill with the intensity of it, seeing her babe take comfort from another woman that she had refused from her own mother. Ella was only a small babe, Rìona tried to remind herself, she didn't understand. And it was better this way.

Better that she not recognize nor need her own mother.

With a murmured excuse, Rìona fled. Fled down the stairs to her study, where she closed the door rather more forcefully than was dignified. Her breath began to come fast and shallow, catching in her chest. Not enough, not nearly enough! She tore at the high neck of her gown, seeking to loosen it, to win herself some more air and still she felt as though she were suffocating.

She turned frantic circles, not seeing the room, not seeing anything, not knowing where to turn or what to do with herself as she fought for breath. Her hands restlessly plunged through the scrolls and papers on her desk, though she could not say what she sought, until finally she swept them all from its surface in a violent swing of her arm. The half-empty goblet of wine that had sat there clattered to the floor with a hollow ring as the sheets of parchment floated down.

She sank to her knees as the first sob ripped itself from her chest, an explosion in the silence of her study, followed quickly by another, and another, each one mounting upon the last, until she retched up her meager dinner from the force of the distress churning in her gut. Kneeling weakly beside her own sick, she gave vent to sobs that quickly became hoarse, anguished screams, breathless shrieks as she beat impotently at the rug covering the stone floor with her fists. Her knuckles began to burn, and then to bleed, and still she wept, sobs finally yielding to hopeless and seemingly unending tears.

She did not hear the concerned murmuring of the servants outside the door to the study, or the commanding voice which cut through their chatter. The door opened, but she was unaware of the clattering footfalls of armored boots crossing the study to where she stared into the fire unseeing, tears pouring down her cheeks as her breath continued to hitch and hiccough.

"Maker's breath, what is it? What has happened?" Loghain's impatient and concerned voice intruded into her despair.

"Go away," Rìona moaned wretchedly, wiping her eyes and trying to collect herself, though a fresh wave of misery threatened to send her into another bout of convulsive sobs.

"Has word arrived from the army? Has the wh—king been harmed? Or, Maker forbid, has something happened to your child?"

"No, no!" Rìona replied, scrubbing at her face. "For the love of Andraste, will you leave me be?"

A handkerchief appeared before her, and Loghain's wry voice floated over her. "If there's one impression I've been able to garner from you, my lady, it's that, despite your youth, inexperience, and deplorable naivete, you have remarkable composure. To find you in this state, I imagine something truly calamitous must have transpired, and I've yet to figure out what that is."

Rìona glared up at him, snatching the handkerchief from his hand. But in his eyes, behind the mild mockery, there lingered a hint of concern, and perhaps even kindness. She found her anger draining from her.

"You've faced many battles," she observed softly after blowing her nose. "How do you prepare yourself to die?"

"You don't," he replied brusquely. "You plan to live and then you do whatever you must to make sure that happens."

"I don't have that luxury. To end this Blight, a Grey Warden must die. I intend for it to be me."

In that moment, it didn't matter that he was her enemy, or that she despised him. All that mattered was that he was there and he was listening, as the words which she had suppressed for so long erupted up out of her soul.

"When the archdemon is slain, its soul passes to the nearest body infected with the taint," she explained, her voice weary and resigned. "If it passes to a darkspawn, the archdemon will be reborn, and the Blight will not end, for the darkspawn has no soul. But two souls cannot inhabit one body. If a Grey Warden is the nearest vessel, the archdemon's soul will try to pass into it, and will be destroyed, along with the Grey Warden."

Loghain closed his eyes. "And there are only three of you now," he sighed. "A state of affairs which may be laid at my feet."

"I've not told Alistair." His eyes opened to fix sharply upon her. Rìona met his gaze with a humorless grimace. "I'm not incapable of doing my own calculus, you know. If Alistair knew, he would insist that it be him, and I cannot allow that. With an heir in place, there is little need for a queen, much less one with a questionable reputation. But a Theirin king has a stabilizing value that will benefit the realm. He cannot die, if I can prevent it."

Loghain crossed his arms forbiddingly over his chest, staring down at her, and Rìona began to feel at a disadvantage. Frowning, she pushed herself to her feet and walked away from him, trying to regain some semblance of composure and authority as she moved, collecting herself.

"The one wrinkle in my plan is that I'm not a great fighter. You, however, are. Therefore, I've decided you'll accompany me, when we join the army," she announced after a moment, pleased that her tone struck the proper note of command and assurance. "Assuming Alistair doesn't behead you on sight, your job will be to ensure that I make it to the archdemon in time to deal the killing blow. And to make certain that _he_ doesn't. And yes, the irony of asking you to make certain the king lives is not lost upon me."

Still he stared at her, his arms folded, and Rìona began to get the distinct impression that once again he was assessing her decisions and finding them wanting. She began to bristle.

"Three Grey Wardens against a horde of thousands of darkspawn seems long odds. You have no ability to create more Grey Wardens?"

"Of course I do!" Rìona snapped waspishly. "Riordan left me with a supply of darkspawn blood and the formula for the Joining ritual, and I have contacts within the Mages' Collective who could handle the lyrium component. But I'm not about to sacrifice others to do the duty which is rightfully my own."

"Yes," he drawled with a touch of derision. "It's always easier to sacrifice oneself than another, or at least it should be in any leader worthy of leading. But what of those times when the greater good is better served with you alive, than with your death? Alistair will need a capable politician to guide him as he learns to be a king. Better you than Eamon, at any rate."

"Well, thank you for that scant praise," Rìona snorted, her voice heavy with ascerbitude. "But once again, your calculus and mine differ. I'll not condemn innocents to the risks of the Joining, and the burden of being a Grey Warden, simply to save my own skin. I won't."

"And what if it weren't an innocent whom you were to condemn, but a man already certain to die?"

Her eyes widened. "You?" He nodded once, brusquely, and after a moment, Rìona sighed and shook her head. "No. I may loathe you, but I've not become that cynical. Not yet, at least."

"Cynicism has nothing to do with it. It's mercy I'm asking for," Loghain said slowly. "I'd rather die defending my country and atoning for my mistakes than under the indignity of the headman's axe."

For a moment, she considered it, and she despised herself for giving it even that much thought. Finally she shook her head again. "I'm sorry. I can't. I can't sacrifice another in my stead, no matter how willing the victim. Thank you, but no."

"Maker's breath, _think_, girl!" he growled in frustration. "You've already disqualified one of the three Grey Wardens as a possibility. And you've admitted you're not a great fighter. What if Riordan falls, and you don't make it to the archdemon? Alistair won't know what to do, and the Blight won't end. Will you condemn Ferelden to destruction to salve your need to martyr yourself?"

Rìona whirled on him, glaring. "I am _not_ being a martyr!"

"Neither are you being a queen!" he snapped, then drew back, his jaw flexing in annoyance for a moment. His voice grew softer, his demeanor growing gentle. And then he thrust the killing blow home.

"You have a child. If you won't live for your country, won't you at least live for her?"


	64. Chapter Sixty Four: Atonement

There seemed to be an absolute inevitability to the reports from Loghain's scouts that the darkspawn horde had suddenly changed direction. The word was that they now surged east up through the Brecilian Passage on what appeared to be a direct course for Denerim. Couriers arrived from Redcliffe as well, bearing news that the army was marching east to engage the horde, hopefully before it reached the capital, but there was no guarantee that they would arrive in time.

Loghain's dire prediction had come true.

An immediate full-scale evacuation of the city commenced once the first report arrived. The refugees, who had been gently shepherded away from the city gates in manageable groups up to this point were now being hurried on their way. No longer were guards sent to escort them, no longer were they provisioned with rations. They were hurried from the city as quickly as the guard could prod them away, trudging north along the cold, wintry road.

The numbers that would die were horrifying, but, as Loghain pointed out, they were just as dead trapped within a city under siege. Still, if felt like a failure to Rìona, that she would be unable to save them all.

Looting became an issue as houses and manses were abandoned, merchants and nobles fleeing the city with what little they could carry. Trials were suspended as a waste of resources and anyone caught breaking the law was summarily exiled from the city. It was the only way to maintain order as the city devolved into chaos.

If she'd had any cause to doubt her decision to free Loghain and enlist his aid, it was more than laid to rest in those weeks as they worked, together with Arl Oswyn, to prepare the city for a siege. In addition, she rather thought she gave him cause to retract some of his own assumptions about her abilities. Her turmoil was laid aside, nearly forgotten as she braced herself to deal with the crisis.

Reports came of sightings of a dragon, soaring above the horde as they destroyed villages. Loghain took these in his stride, acknowledging them with a grave nod, but Rìona could not be so complacent. He was a Grey Warden now, and those reports of the archdemon's approach heralded his own death. Every time Rìona looked at him, she felt nearly sick with remorse for what she had done in that moment of weakness and self-pity. She had foisted her own duty off upon his shoulders. No matter how much sense his arguments had made, or however willing he was, still she regretted the choice.

But it was too late. For better or worse, he was now one of their brethren, and resolved to take the blow that killed the archdemon, if he could. His atonement, he called it, but all Rìona could see was her own selfishness in making him fodder for the archdemon, when the sacrifice was meant to be hers. For one brief, shining moment, she had thought perhaps it was a way to at last claim some happiness for herself, after all she had lost. But the prospect of that joy was bitter. She wondered if she would ever have any peace, knowing her contentment was bought with the blood of another.

Still the horde advanced. When word reached Denerim that the darkspawn were attacking Dragon's Peak, the palace guard escorted Ella—along with Aeda and her son and the nursery maid—to the royal flagship in Denerim Harbor. Out past the harbor, the ship would wait at anchor for two weeks for a signal summoning it back to port. If the archdemon began attacking ships in the harbor, or if the city was lost and the signal did not come, the ship would weigh anchor and sail for Highever port. There, the royal guard accompanying Ella would clear the rest of Howe's rabble out of Castle Cousland and set up a modest household, until Rìona or Alistair could come and claim custody of the princess again.

Smoke appeared on the horizon as the farmholds between Dragon's Peak and Denerim began to burn, and the hurried shuffle of the refugees away from the city walls along the North Road became a panicked stampede which took its own toll in lives. Rìona and Loghain argued bitterly about whether to shut the city gates to prevent the refugees who wanted to flee into the city from doing so, and finally he won when riots broke out and refugees began attacking the guards trying to prevent their entry. The empty ache of remorse was too powerful even for tears when she issued the order refusing the shelter of the city to her own people.

The amount of time until the arrival of the horde was now a matter of hours, rather than days. No messengers had been able to get through from the west for days, leaving them with no clear idea when the army would arrive. Loghain had hopes it would only be a few days at most, that the city would have to hold out against the horde until the army flanked the darkspawn and crushed them against the walls of the city.

"Then why have we closed the gates to the remaining refugees?" Rìona demanded irately. "If it's only to be a few days..."

"And what if it's not only a few days?" Loghain replied laconically. They stood together at midnight on the roof of Fort Drakon, which gave them a vantage to see the approach to the city. In the darkness, fires speckled the horizon as far as the eye could see. Whether they were merely campfires for the darkspawn horde, or burning houses and carts full of refugees who hadn't gotten away soon enough, she couldn't say. "We hope for the best, but plan for the worst."

A shadow crossed his eyes, then, as she glanced at him in the torchlight.

"Is that what you did at Ostagar?" she demanded, not knowing why she felt the urge to needle him, except that she hadn't slept for three days and her nerves were strung taut as they waited for the battle to begin.

"Yes, as a matter of fact." His tone was calm, unaffected, but there was a rigidity to his posture that belied it.

Suddenly Rìona regretted her barb.

"It was after Cailan decided to send for the Orlesian reinforcements, wasn't it?" she asked softly, giving voice to the doubt that had never entirely abated. "You had laid your plans, taken steps to neutralize Arl Eamon and my father, but hadn't absolutely set your mind to betrayal until I convinced the king to heed Duncan's advice."

Loghain gave her a long, measured look, and finally answered in his slow manner, "No. Yes, I laid plans before I went to Ostagar for what I would do if Cailan died in battle, and those plans did include neutralizing Eamon and your father until I had authority consolidated under my control. They were both too subject to Orlesian influence, you see. So far as I knew, your father was helping Celene make her bid for marriage to Cailan, and Eamon has ties to Orlais through marriage. I knew—or thought I knew—if Cailan fell in battle, the two of them would seek aid from Orlais. But I always hoped it wouldn't come to that, that Cailan would listen to reason and not kill himself in a foolhardy bid for glory. I made my decision when Cailan gave the order to charge. Once he did that, the battle was over."

"I don't understand."

"He was a capable fighter, but not strong enough to be on the front lines. If he had held back, directed the fight from the rear, he might have lived. And if he had kept his troops back against the fortress in an easily defensible formation, where the darkspawn would have to bottle themselves up in the valley to engage them, we could have had victory. But he had to rush out from his defensible position, charge the horde in the open. From that point on, even if we had won, _even if Cailan had survived_, the cost in lives to defeat the darkspawn would have left Ferelden's defenses decimated. We would have had no army left to speak of, when and if the archdemon did make its appearance. I imagined that was your plan all along." Loghain frowned heavily. "Did I abandon Cailan before he fell? Yes. Did I plan for the possibility that I would have to do something to that effect? Yes. Did I know it was treason when I did it? Yes. No matter what reason I give for it now, it sounds unjustifiable. All I can say was that it seemed necessary at the time."

Rìona shook her head. "Even if you were wrong, even if Cailan had done all you advised him to do and you hadn't been driven to treason, still my family would have been dead, and merely as a part of your _contingency plan._ I can't say I'm any more comforted knowing that."

He offered her a tight grimace. "Yes. I'll pay for that transgression soon enough, have no fear."

His words felt like a spear through her gut, stirring up all the unease and guilt over her decision into a churning roil once again.

"I didn't make you a Grey Warden for the sake of vengeance."

"No. That's just a fortunate side effect." To her surprise, something resembling humor lifted the corner of his mouth, before he turned away brusquely. "We should get to the city walls. The horde will be here within a few hours, and no doubt you'll want to be with the archers' corps when it does."

It should have felt strange, standing before the combined city and royal guard, giving them an encouraging speech about defending their homes and loved ones, about holding the line until the army arrived to end the threat to their country once and for all. She was no general, but then, they didn't expect her to be. They looked to her as their queen, even if that title wasn't properly hers yet. Perhaps they even saw in her the embodiment of the things they must defend. They saw in her their wives and daughters.

Loghain left the wall to oversee the reinforcement and defense of the gates, and Rìona took her place among the archers, as youths acting as squires scuttled up and down the stairs to the parapets atop the wall, bearing quivers full of every arrow to be found in the city. They would only be able to turn away so many of the horde before they ran out, but hopefully it would be enough to thin the ranks, lessen the burden upon those holding the gates. The goal was to win each hour they could, before the gate collapsed and the darkspawn horde poured into the city.

She felt them out there, Maker, so many thousands of them, moving toward her, and it felt right. She felt the archdemon, knew he sensed her, knew he was coming for her, and it felt right. That was the most horrifying part of all. Even as she prepared herself to kill as many darkspawn as possible, the taint within her blood sang out to them, compelling her to join them, to be part of them.

As the first gray pre-dawn light began to lighten the sky over Denerim Harbor, to the west, the front line of the horde appeared, and the battle was entered.

Throughout the day, the archers fought in shifts, resting when their arms were so weary they could no longer aim accurately or draw their bows. When another took her place, Rìona sank down upon the ground at the base of the city wall beside the other relieved archers, dutifully eating her ration of a dried meat-and-grain roll and drinking a dipperful of tepid water carried in a bucket by a page down the line of exhausted archers. Somehow, she even managed to doze, as she waited for her arms to function again, despite the screams and roars of battle around her. When morning crept to afternoon, she ascended the wall again and relieved another archer, sending one unerring arrow after another into the mass of darkspawn trying to batter down the gate.

At times she heard Loghain on the ground below her, bellowing orders. When next she found herself unable to hold a draw without her arms trembling uncontrollably, Rìona went down to him for a report. The gate didn't appear to be holding well, despite the hastily constructed reinforcements. The portcullis was fatally weakened and would be gone before sunset, leaving only the gate itself, which wouldn't hold long, despite being barricaded and supported from behind.

"My hope that we might hold out for several days will not come to pass," he summarized almost calmly, as though this realization troubled him not at all. "The horde will be in the city before the army arrives to flank them."

"Maker!" Rìona sighed. "All right, we have two choices. We can begin clearing the population out of the outlying districts, pull them back toward the palace district, as our second line of defense, or we can leave them scattered throughout the city. In the latter case they're less individually defended, but also less concentrated. Pulling them back to the palace district seems more like corralling them for the slaughter when the darkspawn do eventually break through."

Loghain nodded once, and Rìona had the impression—though he gave no other indication—that he approved of her reasoning. Rìona felt her eyes narrow, her mouth tightening. A part of her wanted to automatically reject the logic out of spite and Rìona forced herself to push the impulse aside. It wasn't about him and her hatred of him, but about the best way to defend her people.

She drew a deep breath. "Maker help us, we can't shelter them. Better they should hide in their houses and attempt to wait it out. When the gate's about to fall, pull the guard back to the palace district to make their next stand, but don't attempt to evacuate the populace from the outlying districts."

"Yes, Your Highness." It was the first time he'd yielded her that title. Loghain sketched an abrupt bow and walked away, and Rìona returned to the walls.

The archdemon appeared with a roar just before nightfall, swooping over the city spitting gouts of flame that set rooftops ablaze and sent panicked citizens fleeing from their homes. Rìona lost a significant portion of her archers' corps when he took aim at the city walls, and she was forced to give the order to abandon their posts and fall back to the palace district. Without the archers to cull and slow the horde, the collapse of the gates was imminent and inevitable, and as she rushed down the stairs from the wall, she heard Loghain shouting a similar command, ordering the guard to fall back and barricade the palace district.

They heard the splintering of the massive oaken gate as they ran.

They retreated not merely to the palace district, but to the palace itself. It would be some time before the darkspawn assaulted the palace district; they would be occupied rampaging through the city for a good while. The guard worked and rested in shifts, building barricades on the approach to the palace from which the archers' corps would attack the darkspawn while the infantry engaged them.

As for Rìona and Loghain, they found themselves relatively useless. Until the archdemon landed, they actually needed to protect themselves rather than risk their lives on the front line, or everything would be for naught. It rankled them both not to be fighting alongside the defenders, and they each made a point of overseeing the efforts of the guard. But once the darkspawn did attack, their objective would not be defending the palace district from the horde, but finding a way to engage the archdemon.

Runners were positioned throughout the city, risking their lives to hold posts that would enable them to report on the progress of the darkspawn through the city. It was one of these runners who brought news that the royal army had engaged the horde at the gates of the city, shortly after the darkspawn broke through. The information was met by cheers in the throne-room, where Rìona and Loghain waited for any report that might help them formulate a clearer strategy on how to engage the archdemon.

The night wore on, isolated reports trickling in of districts under attack by bands of darkspawn that had made it into the city before the army had attacked the horde from behind. The Market District, the Alienage, the lives and livelihoods of Denerim citizens fell before their advance. They were progressing toward the palace district faster than anticipated, and Rìona had the distinct impression that she and Loghain were actually their goal. The complete destruction of the city would come after.

Then, they both looked up in shock at the same moment as a terrible shriek ripped through their minds and a mighty roar shook the walls off the throne room. Guards came pelting in from outside the palace bringing report: the archdemon had plummeted to the roof of Fort Drakon, apparently badly wounded and scarcely able to fly.

They took off for Fort Drakon at a sprint, the palace guard falling in behind them. They found Riordan's body broken upon the cobbles at the base of the fortress, and Rìona knelt beside him briefly to murmur a benediction.

When she stood, Loghain was giving her a grave look. "Perhaps you should return to the palace. There's no need for you to be there, after all."

"And what if you fail?" Rìona asked, lifting an acerbic eyebrow. To that, he had no reply, and after a moment, she regretted her impatience.

Parties of darkspawn were just beginning to reach the fortress, flocking to the side of the fallen archdemon, and there was no more time. Still, as they cleared their way to the top of the fort, every instinct within her screamed that something was amiss. The closer they drew to the archdemon, the more she knew she had erred.

It was wrong, all wrong. Wrong to keep the truth from Alistair. Wrong to offer Loghain the chance at redemption when he deserved the ignominy of a traitor's death. Wrong to place her duty on the shoulders of another. Wrong to expect him to die in her stead.

Wrong. So many wrong choices, since that day at Ostagar when she had wrapped Cailan up in the web of her schemes. Or perhaps the choices had gone awry long before that, perhaps on the day when she was fifteen and she convinced her parents that she should attempt to seduce the king. That one rash, vain decision had dictated all that came after.

Now she had one last chance, to put it all to rights. A chance to escape the sobs and screams and dying groans of the innocents who had died at Highever. A chance to silence the voice of little Oren, asking if she might teach him to use a sword. A chance to silence the voice of her mother, urging Rìona to flee while she remained behind. A chance to silence the voice of Fergus, who would have been abandoned in the Korcari Wilds courtesy of her actions.

A chance to be free of all the doubt and fear and certainty that she was unworthy of the task laid before her.

Shouldering her bow, she manned a ballista, sending bolts at the mighty wounded dragon wallowing clumsily on the roof of the fort, which Loghain and the soldiers of the palace guard engaged him. His roars deafened her to all else, crashing through the inside of her skull even as they battered her eardrums. But he was weakening. Yes, she could see it. Staggering drunkenly, no longer able to take flight, oozing ichor from a hundred wounds as he trampled her fallen guard. Around him, Conall leapt and barked, charging in and out to strike at his feet.

Grimly, Rìona unslung her bow from her shoulder, and took aim. Not at the archdemon.

At Loghain.

When the archdemon collapsed and lay there struggling to rise, she loosed a single arrow. Loghain roared in pain, as the shot she had perfected long before she ever left Highever pierced the joint between his greave and his sabaton and hobbled him.

His eyes blazed with rage and betrayal as they sought hers.

"I'm sorry!" Rìona shouted, praying he would hear her as she scooped up a sword from a fallen guard. On the far side of the roof, she saw Alistair and Zevran emerge from a door with Sten and Wynne behind them, and she heard Alistair yell her name. "I _can't_. I'm sorry!"

Carrying the sword at an awkward, untrained angle, she sprinted the distance to the archdemon. Sliding to her knees on a pool of ichor, she missed her first thrust at his head and caught him under the chin. She barely made it out from under the massive head as it collapsed.

Staggering the last few steps, she drew back the sword, and plunged it into his skull.


	65. Chapter Sixty Five: Reclamation

The explosion that accompanied the archdemon's death knocked them all off their feet, slamming them onto the hard slates of the rooftop. In truth, Zevran was astonished it didn't blast them all clear off the roof of the fortress; he heard screams as those nearest the edge of the roof were flung over to plummet to their deaths. When he regained his footing, there were darkspawn, panicked and disordered, but still a threat. With furious roars, Sten charged them, the former regent limping into the fray after him, but he and Alistair ran together to Rìona's side, where she lay in a crumpled heap beside the archdemon's massive corpse.

Zevran could not recall a time since he was a child when he had known panic, and yet he knew it in that moment. Her stillness and pallor as Alistair rolled her over with frantic hands were terrifying. _¡Sangre del Hacedor!_ Had the witch played Alistair false? Had something simply gone awry? Why was she not moving, when everyone else had regained their feet?

"_Riona!_" Alistair's voice caught on a desperate sob as his hands fumbled at her throat, searching for a pulse. In the flickering light of the burning city, an earring in his ear glittered. Zevran had given it to him last night, after Morrigan had gone, as Alistair sat stunned and silent in his tent, unsure he had done the right thing, paralyzed by self-doubt. It glinted as he gathered Rìona up and pressed his other ear to her chest, listening.

Hopeless, despairing, hollow, Zevran dropped to his knees beside them. For once, self-preservation was the farthest thing from his mind. All around them, the darkspawn still fought their allies, but it did not matter. All Zevran knew was that if she was gone, after what Alistair had done to save her, he would lose them both.

He felt as if the gates of the Black City were slamming shut behind him in that endless moment of fear, until she gave a cough, her body heaving, wracked with convulsions in Alistair's arms as she fought for breath.

_Piedad de Andraste, gracias. Gracias,_" Zevran found himself whispering as Alistair clutched her to his chest, weeping intermingled with astonished, exultant laughter. He touched her face with a shaking hand, as though in disbelief.

"Thank the Maker," he chanted, over and over, rocking her and pressing kisses into her hair, sweaty and matted to her skull. The force of the explosion had knocked her helm off. "Thank the Maker."

The sounds of battle around them began to fade, as the last of the leaderless darkspawn were slain or fled. Some were so mindlessly panicked they hurled themselves over the edge of the tower rather than fleeing down the stairs. Rìona lay limply across Alistair's lap, moving weakly, not yet conscious but clearly alive.

Uneven, armored footfalls approached slowly, and Zevran and Alistair lifted their heads in tandem to see the former regent limping toward them, the shaft of an arrow still protruding from his ankle.

"Is she dead?" he demanded shortly.

Alistair shook his head. "No."

For some reason, the former regent looked annoyed by this news. "How is that possible? I was given to understand that the Grey Warden who slew the archdemon died."

"And just how do you know—? "Alistair's voice trailed off, his eyes widening. "You're a Grey Warden. She made you a Warden."

Loghain gave a brusque nod. "Yes."

"She..." Alistair looked down at Rìona, then back up to the former regent, frowning in confusion. "She meant you to take the killing blow?"

He blew out an irritated breath. "That was the idea, yes. Until she went mad."

Alistair's indignant response was cut off as Rìona began to stir in his arms, her eyes fluttering open to peer up at Alistair. Confusion furrowed her brow as she glanced from him to Zevran to Loghain, and back.

"I'm not dead."

Alistair gave a jagged, slightly hysterical chuckle. "No, love. You're not."

"A state of affairs I'm sure some of us would like to have explained," Loghain interjected with an edge of impatience.

"Yes, well, you'll pardon me if your preferences aren't my concern right now," Alistair muttered. He shifted their position, and Rìona cried out in pain.

Zevran began to cast about for Wynne, seeing her already making her way toward them, pausing to check on wounded guardsmen and soldiers as she passed. Like all of them, Wynne looked drawn and exhausted. She up-ended a vial of lyrium potion and knelt down at Rìona's side, her hands glowing. The rictus of pain on Rìona's face began to relax.

As Wynne healed her, Alistair looked up and around, and then glanced at Zevran.

"Zev, will you take care of her, see that she gets back to the palace?" He gave a helpless shrug, lying her upon the slates. "I imagine I'll be needed here for some time, overseeing things."

"Of course." Zevran gave a brusque nod, and Alistair stood, striding away as though a backward glance would weaken his resolve. After a moment, the former regent growled and followed him.

* * *

It galled, to allow Loghain to live. He didn't deserve it. He should have been executed the moment Alistair returned to Denerim. But Alistair couldn't bring himself to kill another Grey Warden, much less one who had knowingly volunteered to give up his life to end the Blight.

And so, in the days following the Battle of Denerim, Loghain's sentence was commuted in recognition of his service to the realm. If Alistair had found the time, he would have spent the evening after making that decree getting well and truly soused, but he didn't. Instead, he gritted his teeth and began writing correspondence to the Grey Wardens of Orlais, seeking a posting for Loghain there. It might have been petty, but it was the only retribution left to him.

Days spun into weeks, in which he and Rìona barely spoke. She was still busy setting the city to rights alongside Arl Oswyn, which Alistair was occupied commanding the army as they drove the darkspawn back to the Deep Roads. A troubling number of the remaining horde were fleeing north, rather than back south, toward Amaranthine. If they weren't stopped soon, their rampaging would blight desperately needed farmlands just in time for the spring planting.

Then there was the matter of the famine. Crops had been less last year, due to the spreading of the Blight, and would continue to be so this year, with so much of Ferelden's fertile farmland corrupted. Refugees continued to seek passage away from Ferelden's shores, their lands and livelihoods destroyed, hoping to find new opportunity in the Free Marches and beyond. While Alistair dealt with military matters, Rìona worked with the bannorn to organize ways to move surplus foodstores from unaffected holdings to those most in need, and she was beginning the painstaking process of selecting ambassadors and conducting correspondence with Orlais and other nearby countries, who would seek aid, banking on goodwill toward Ferelden for sparing the rest of Thedas from the Blight to serve in lieu of steeper payments for whatever aid the other nations rendered.

When Rìona wasn't working she was in the nursery, often for hours at a time, with Ella. Alistair knew she was there, because dozens of times he set off with the determination of finding and confronting her, only to flinch back and change his mind before passing through the door.

She never came to him, never demanded an explanation for why she was still alive. Loghain did and, unable to expose what he had done, Alistair had lied to him and claimed not to know what had happened. But Rìona didn't seem to care how she had survived.

Arl Eamon took the planning of the coronation into his own hands, and Alistair knew he and Rìona must speak before that day came. Ella's Naming ceremony was supposed to be immediately afterward, in which he would declare the babe his heir. Alistair would need to know whether to present Rìona as the future queen at the coronation, or whether she was still determined that he not wed her. Time was dwindling, and she seemed to be avoiding him. Alistair had half-expected Zevran to do the same, taking a position of conscientious neutrality until Alistair and Rìona could find their footing once more, but he didn't. Each night, Zevran came to Alistair's bedchamber. For whatever reason, Zev didn't go to Rìona. Indeed, she seemed as distant from Zevran as she did from Alistair.

Finally, a week before the coronation, Alistair could take no more. He strode into the nursery and ordered the wet-nurse and nursery maid out.

Almost as soon as they were gone, inevitably, Zevran appeared. Alistair was so used to the way Zev managed to slip unnoticed passed the palace personnel and into his private chambers that he barely gave it a second thought, but Rìona seemed surprised.

"We need to talk," Alistair declared, his jaw clenching angrily. Rìona glanced down at the sleeping babe in her arms and nodded once, gravely. Silently, Zevran stood leaning against a pillar, his arms crossed and his posture watchful.

"There's no need to say anything," Rìona said tiredly before he could speak again. "Even if you could forgive me for not telling you about... how the archdemon is slain, I know you will never forgive me for making Loghain a Grey Warden. I understand. We'll break our betrothal, and after the coronation, I'll retire to Highever to begin rebuilding."

Fury flooded Alistair, so intense it took a moment of effort to speak.

"Fine. You can go. But Ella stays here."

"_What?_" Rìona stared at him, aghast, and even Zevran looked slightly startled.

"You go ahead. Do what you always do. Give up on us without a fight. But if you leave, Ella stays. I won't have her carted around like baggage while you turn tail and run."

"You can't possibly be serious!"

"Can't I?" he asked bitterly, pacing to the far end of the nursery and back in long, agitated strides. "You think this is about _Loghain?_ Maker's breath, I was _relieved_ when I realized what you had done, making him a Warden!" His voice was escalating to a shout, and he knew he should stop, rather than risk waking Ella, but he couldn't "I was relieved! Because it was the _first time_ since I've known you that I've seen even the slightest indication that you actually want to live!"

Rìona's eyes grew huge and filled with tears, her face draining of color. "How dare you?"

"Oh, come off it!" Alistair snapped, then drew himself back in, calming himself as he turned to look away from her. "I didn't _really_ understand what it was you had been doing all this time, until I realized you hadn't told me the truth about the archdemon. Then, suddenly, it all made sense. All those stunts you've pulled since Ostagar. Provoking Loghain's men in Lothering into beating you. Letting Jowan bleed you for his and Morrigan's ritual in Redcliffe. The abominations in the Circle Tower, the mercenaries here in Denerim, fighting the high dragon over Haven, confronting Flemeth rather than leaving her be. Always, _always_ you had some perfect rationale for why it was the best way, the only way, but it wasn't. You've been courting death since I've known you, and when you weren't trying to get yourself killed, you were always so quick to sink into melancholy the moment things went awry in any way.

"Were you like this before you lost your family?" Alistair shrugged. "I certainly can't say. But knowing you recruited Loghain to take that killing blow gave me hope that maybe, just once, you'd fight to stay alive, fight for us. But you couldn't even do that, could you? No, instead you backed out at the last moment and tried to get yourself killed one last time. If I hadn't—"

In flat tones, he told her what he had done, why she was still alive. Rìona clutched Ella closer as he told her why Morrigan had wanted her to abort her babe so badly.

Alistair hung his head as he concluded his tale. "After I talked to Zev about it, I turned to go back to my tent, to agree to Morrigan's plan. But before I got there, I froze, no longer sure I should do it. I didn't hesitate for fear of the repercussions, but because for a moment, just an instant, I thought, you'd finally found a way to get what you've been seeking all this time, and maybe I should just leave you to it. Maybe me and Zevran and Ella won't ever be enough for you to be happy."

His eyes burned as he approached her, squatting before her as he had that day in the Brecilian Forest when he had offered her a rose. He searched her blotchy, tear-stained face for some spark of hope or will.

"I love you," he whispered hoarsely, reaching up to stroke her cheek. "And I want you with us. I want us to be a family. I sold my soul to give us one last chance. I'm begging you, love. Don't make that bargain have been in vain."

Rìona's face crumpled as she began to weep brokenly, but Alistair found he could not take her in his arms and comfort her. Instead, he took Ella and laid the sleeping babe gently in a cradle so that Rìona's distress need not disturb her. Then, he paced to the window and stared out while she wept quietly.

"And what of you, Zevran?" he heard her ask after a time. "Do you agree?"

Alistair looked over his shoulder as Zevran unfolded himself from his leaning, watchful position by the pillar to approach her.

"I have seen it many times in the Crows, _querida._" He spoke gently, tracing the track of a tear with one gentle fingertip. "I have even done it myself, once. Until I found something worth living for. Can we not be enough?"

"I don't know!" she said desperately. "I've been... haunted, afraid, overwhelmed so long, I can scarcely remember a time when this, this misery hasn't been hovering over me constantly, ready to drag me under. I've been so certain I would die, I'm not sure if I even know how to live."

Zevran gathered her into his arms, soothing her almost as one would a child. After a moment, unable to hold himself apart, Alistair followed, wrapping around her from behind. She felt small and frail between them, and for the first time since his realization of her latent death wish, Alistair recalled just how young she was. Eighteen, when her family had been slaughtered and the fate of the world dropped on her shoulders. It was a wonder she had borne it at all.

They stayed that way until Rìona's tears dried, and until Ella began to cry in her cradle. Wiping her face, Rìona rose, smoothing down her crumpled skirts and went to retrieve the babe.

The look of peace that came over her face when Ella was in her arms was heartbreaking. No wonder she spent so much time in the nursery, if it soothed her this way. If anything gave Alistair hope for her, wounded as she was, it was that. If she were entirely lost to them, she wouldn't be seeking that sort of comfort.

"She's hungry," Rìona said after a moment, a shadow of grief crossing her face. "Send for Aeda. I can no longer suckle her. My milk dried as I was preparing for—"

Her eyes dropped. "As I was preparing to die."

She had lost that, too. That simple act in which she had taken such joy for too short a time. She wasn't entirely without cause for her melancholy, Alistair thought with a grimace. Zevran slipped away, and Alistair rang for the wet-nurse.

* * *

Rìona paced her chambers, hugging her dressing gown tightly around her, torn with nervousness and indecision.

It was ridiculous. She was hardly some shrinking maiden on her wedding night. No, the wedding was some months off yet, the coronation just accomplished earlier that afternoon. She had been presented as the king's future bride, and Ella Named and acknowledged as his heir. It was everything they had planned for, dreamed of. Even better had been the fact that she now knew Fergus to be alive. He had arrived at court several days ago, having spent many months of the Blight among the Chasind after he'd been wounded in the Korcari Wilds. He had been there, today, at the coronation. Her family was not entirely destroyed.

There was no reason for her nerves. And yet, as she girded herself to make the short walk to Alistair's chambers—where she knew she would find Zevran as well—for the first time since that night in the Cousland manor before the Landsmeet, she felt fearful. Not that she believed they would reject her, for all that she had not informed them that she planned to come, but because taking this step somehow felt like...

A new beginning, perhaps? A dismissal of the past and an acceptance of the future?

She didn't know, couldn't say with any certainty. All she knew was that it felt significant. Momentous. They had given her space, since that day in the nursery, but it was time. Time to begin this new life they were going to attempt to build together.

It was odd to no longer feel as though everything was on the brink of crashing down around her. She kept looking around for danger and finding none. It should have been a relief, but she'd lived under that burden so long, it was a bit frightening to be without it.

She didn't know who she was anymore, when she wasn't in the middle of a crisis.

She wasn't the woman she had thought herself, back in Highever, that much was certain. She wasn't the self-assured, cultured courtesan she'd been raised to be. She wasn't that charming, glittering creature who knew her own power and was always in control. Perhaps she never had been. Perhaps that had always been a façade.

_Enough,_ she told herself impatiently, and only then realized she'd spoken the word aloud. "Enough."

If she delayed any longer she'd think herself into paralysis, and continue to delay until any chance of claiming a future for all of them from the pain and wreckage of the past was gone. Jerking the sash of her dressing gown tighter about her waist, she strode from her chambers and made her way the short distance down the hall to Alistair's.

There were no guards along the hallway. They were posted outside the family wing, to ensure privacy. And Zevran, at Alistair's insistence, had his own chambers in the family wing. That had astonished Rìona, for it would no doubt cause gossip, in that discreet Fereldan way. Then, she realized, that was the point. Alistair had undertaken to promote the impression that Zevran was his lover, so that no scandal would attach to Rìona. It would go a long way to explaining why he was so insistent upon having Ella as his heir, and also why he and Rìona might never produce any children of their own.

Never would Rìona face scrutiny or censure for not producing an heir, as Anora had. When Fereldans gossiped around their king and queen—protesting all the while that, of course, it was no one's business what the royal pair got up to in the privacy of their own bedchambers—the scandal would be upon Alistair, never on her.

It wasn't perfect. But it was as close to it as they could ever come.

All that remained was for Rìona to make herself a part of the contented existence Alistair and Zevran were trying to build for them all.

She did not rap upon the door. She considered it, and decided that no, to do so would be too tentative, too uncertain. She would not ask permission to be with them. They were hers, and she theirs, however estranged they all had been. Instead, she turned the handle and let herself into the sitting room of Alistair's chambers. In the bedchamber, beyond the antechamber, she could hear their voices raised in conversation; drawing her shoulders back, taking a deep breath, she walked toward them.

Ah, Maker! The joy in Zevran's eyes when he noticed her standing there, clutching her dressing gown around her. The relief in Alistair's face! How could she have doubted that she would be welcome?

In an instant, while Alistair was still setting aside his goblet of warmed wine, Zevran was upon her, snatching her body to him. His lips possessed hers roughly, one hand fisting in her hair while the other impatiently shoved her dressing gown from her shoulders and tore at the sash that belted it.

It wasn't the welcome she had expected. She had thought they would be sweet, tender. That they would make love to her with gentle poignancy as they had that night before the Landsmeet. But... perhaps it was better, that they did not. That time had been about endings, about partings. This was something altogether different.

Zevran's hard hand jerked her head back, and his teeth nipped painfully at her neck. With her dressing gown pooled at her feet, his free hand sought her nipple. His thumb stroked over it for a moment, before it took it between his fingertips and pinched, hard.

"Too long you have been alone with your burdens, your fears, your doubts, _querida,_" he growled, biting her ear hard enough to draw a pained sound from her. "You will let us take that from you."

It wasn't a request.

"Yes," she whispered, and found herself shoved backward abruptly, into the hard bulwark of Alistair's chest. He caught her in arms that closed around her like iron bands, his calloused hands seeking out her breasts, cupping them, testing their weight and heft.

"No gentle wooing for this one, tonight, _cariño_," Zevran stated, meeting Alistair's eyes over the top of her head. "She has held herself apart from us, and will suffer the consequences."

Rìona's knees weakened, and if Alistair had not been holding her, she might have sunk down upon them, unable to support herself. Tense heat coiled deep in her belly, sending out tendrils of aching arousal to tug at her sex.

"That sounds _just fine_ to me," Alistair answered in gravelly tones, catching the mood. His hand wrenched her head aside and his mouth dipped down to suck and bite on that sensitive junction between her shoulder and neck. Zevran's hand cupped the side of her jaw, his thumb sliding across her lower face to press insistently at her lips. Rìona parted to him, and his thumb thrust inside. Rìona closed her eyes and sucked upon it, twined her tongue around it, let it press down until she was forced to open her mouth under the pressure, at which point Zevran's mouth came forward, his tongue flicking at her lips, joining his thumb in occupying the recesses of her mouth.

It was not a kiss. A kiss she could have returned, made some effort to control. It was about possession, about demonstrating his control. Rìona found herself sinking under the spell, found herself softening, yielding far more readily than she had ever done before.

Trapped between them, bound by the thews of Alistair's arms and the press of Zevran's body, Rìona moaned softly. Her body became liquid, pliant, sinking into Alistair's. There was a hard and not entirely comfortable bulge pressing against her back at her waist, and when she sank against it, he pushed with his hips, meeting the pressure and friction of her bare body through his fine linen breeches.

Zevran's thumb trailed moisture from her mouth down the length of her torso. His hand thrust between her thighs, his fingers hooking unerringly up into her slick channel as his palm ground against her wet curls. He leaned his brow against hers, his breath slashing across her face, and drove his fingers in deeper. A few thrusts of his fingers, a few presses of his palm, and she quivered on the edge of disintegration, bucking and keening in their arms.

Zevran withdrew his hand, and offered his fingers to Alistair, and Rìona moaned abjectly as that shining precipice of release receded.

Alistair took Zevran's fingers into his mouth and sucked, lapping her essence from them, as Zevran gave her a chiding look.

"Did you think it would be so easy, _querida?_ Do you think I jest, when I say you shall suffer the consequences of making us wait?"

They had played this game of denial before, so long ago here in Denerim. That day Zevran had taken her outside herself, relieved her of her burdens, driven her beyond herself until she had dissolved into sobs and tears in his arms. It was the day, she knew now, that she had begun to fall in love with him.

Was that why Zevran had chosen it tonight, to welcome her back?

Rìona shook her head in answer for, suddenly, speaking seemed presumptuous.  
Alistair lifted his head, releasing Zevran's fingers with a final stroke of his tongue. Rìona found herself wondering what exactly Alistair's role would be tonight, for he had always been aggressive in a way that never quite stepped over into actual dominance.

She was soon to find out, though, as Alistair's hands landed on her shoulders and pressed, compelling her to her knees.

"I want to see your mouth around Zev," he rasped as she sank, and Rìona wanted to grovel for immediate release at the force of the pang the command sent through her. Before her face, Zevran's hands pulled at his own laces, drawing his hardened shaft out from his codflap.

Her mouth slid over Zevran's length with more energy than artistry, urged on by that savage note in Alistair's voice that seemed to preclude the patience for pretty demonstrations of skill. His large hands rested on her head, making her keenly aware of her vulnerability, of the fact that at any moment he could shove her, force her beyond her own pace. He didn't, but the fear and anticipation that he _might_ kept her body tense as her hands rested on Zevran's narrow hips and her mouth worked up and down his cock.

At length, Zevran's hands joined Alistair's, and he _did_ push her, his hips thrusting, taking her to the very edge of what she could endure before she began to struggle. Once his seed had surged across her tongue, Alistair drew her to her feet, spun her about to face him, and kissed her. Roughly, deeply, his tongue thrust into her mouth, tasting Zevran from her.

She didn't notice Zevran disrobing, so lost was she in Alistair's hungry kiss, until his bare body pressed against her back, his relaxed shaft nestling against her backside. He drew her hair off her neck and began covering the back of it with a series of firm bites, until Rìona gasped and drew away from Alistair's mouth to whimper. As Alistair's hands had done before, Zevran's came around her front, sliding up from her waist, past her ribs, to her breasts. Suddenly, Rìona's body went rigid as he crushed them within his hands. She cried out in pain, jerking and struggling, but there was no escape from between the bodies pressed against her.

He held her that way until something within her relaxed, accepting the pain rather than fighting against it. Her breasts ached when he released them, and she thought it entirely possible she would wear large bruises in the morning. That thought sent another cramping surge of arousal through her belly.

Zevran's fingertips found her nipples and clamped down in a merciless vise, pulling them out and up, drawing them as far from her body as they would go, suspending the entire weight of her breasts by his hold on her nipples. Again, Rìona cried out and fought, and again, he persisted until struggle gave way to surrender. Then he released his grip and his palms rubbed soothing circles over her abused nipples.

When Rìona's eyes opened, she saw Alistair looking down, watching Zevran's hands, before flitting up to inspect her face. From the way his eyes darkened, he liked what he saw.

"What do you think, _cariño?_" Zevran's voice purred to Alistair from behind her ear, his palms still tracing those circles that were now less soothing and more maddeningly chafing. "Do you wish to sample the delights of her mouth as well, before we move on?"

"Hm. No, I don't think so." Alistair frowned thoughtfully, studying her face with a near-frightening intensity. He continued to stare as Zevran's hands stilled, one holding Rìona's breast cupped, while the other seized her nipple between fingertips again in a brutal grasp. Rìona emitted a small scream, and Alistair's nostrils flared.

"I never realized before how much she looks like she's in pain when she comes," he remarked to Zevran in considering tones. "Sounds the same, too, though I realized that back in Orzammar."

"You wish to explore this further?"

Alistair nodded, still intent upon Rìona's face. "She's to be punished, after all, right?"

"_Sí._ Did you have something in mind?"

Dear Maker, it was both humiliating and deeply arousing to be discussed as if she wasn't even there, as if her wishes mattered for naught. Zevran's other hand did to the opposite nipple what his first had done, pinching cruelly, wrenching another strangled cry from Rìona.

And still Alistair stared, as though she were a riddle he was trying to decipher. There was a hint of uncertainty in his gaze, his brow furrowing for a moment. Then he nodded, slowly, his lips quirking into a small smile that was more frightening than reassuring. "She told me you whipped her with a belt, once. I admit, I was a bit appalled at the time. Now, I think maybe I'd like to see that."

Oh, Maker, she had told him about that night. She'd told him how peaceful and transcendent it had been. Was he doing this for her benefit, then?

The bulge digging into her belly seemed to indicate not. Or at least, not entirely.

"An excellent idea," Zevran murmured, his voice heavy with satisfaction. "You may be her ropes so that we need not bind her. Unless you would rather wield the belt—?"

Alistair shook his head. "I don't think I could pay proper attention to her face if I did."

The empty ache between her thighs continued to pulse, the air cool whenever it brushed her slick folds, as Zevran took her by the hair and propelled her toward the side of the king's massive bed. He thrust her forward, bending her over the high surface so that her feet rested on the floor and her torso lay upon the bed. Alistair quickly shed his clothing and mounted the bed from the other side, crawling toward her, his muscles flexing and gleaming in the firelight. Then he knelt before her face, his cock thrusting out from above his hard thighs, and took her wrists in his hands, drawing her clenched fists against his chest. The position stretched Rìona out and left her with no leverage to move her upper body.

"That should do it," he murmured, and for no reason she could discern, Rìona pulled a bit, not quite struggling against his grasp, but testing it. Alistair's hands tightened on her wrists. Not enough to be painful, but enough to make it clear his grip was unbreakable. And then, for just an instant, he squeezed a bit, causing the bones of her wrists to grind slightly, as if to send the message that yes, he could grip hard enough to hurt her, hard enough to bruise, if she made him do so.

"Mm," Zevran said approvingly behind her, dragging his blunted nails down her back from her shoulders to her waist. Her nerves came alive where they passed, becoming more sensitive, tingling and singing. He did the same to her backside, harder, livening her skin, leaving lines of warm, aching sensation in the wake of his fingers from the flare of her hips to the point where her rump curved down into her thighs.

Over and over, he did that, until it became discomfort in its own right, an excess of sensation, her skin beginning to burn from the abrasion. Rìona squirmed, rocking from side to side with her hips to get away, but there was nowhere she could move. Alistair's grasp upon her wrists was unyielding.

There was a slithering sound behind her, and the cool leather of a strap brushed her backside. With snaps firm enough to make her give a startled yelp, it cracked down once on each side of her rump, and then it was gone. Zevran's fingers delved between her thighs, plunging into her moisture effortlessly, and Rìona closed her eyes in abject humiliation at the fact of his finding her so desperately wet.

With firm caresses of his fingers, he brought her once again to the very brink of release, thrashing and bucking against Alistair's grip as she climbed toward the precipice. She wailed and begged shamelessly, but as before, his fingers withdrew, trailing her wetness across her backside as he chuckled behind her.

"Not yet, _querida._" he taunted. "Not until you are truly chastised shall you have your reward."

And then the belt came down. As he had done before, over a year ago now, he gave her little time to adapt, only a very short while of gentler strokes to warm up to the whipping. He was not teasing her, doing this for her pleasure, but to break her down, to drive her hard and mercilessly beyond thought, beyond control, to a place of utter surrender and catharsis.

Sensation became pain, pain became agony, agony became torture, and still he drove her, slashing one line of liquid fire after another across her rear. When her rump was ablaze, he turned his efforts to the tender, sensitive backs of her thighs, welting them as Rìona screeched and flailed, fighting against Alistair's unbreakable grasp. Her entire body thrashed until Zevran began to miss his aim, at which point he moved to her side, placed one hand on the small of her back, leaned his weight upon it, and continued to whip her with the other hand.

Tears began to stream from her eyes, and she ducked her head to hide them from Alistair's keen, searching gaze, but he forestalled her with a quickly snapped command, taking both her wrists into one of his large hands to cup her chin with the other and force her to look up. She gazed into the tender determination and fierce love in his eyes and something within her ruptured, spilling out the malignant despair in which she had been mired since the night Highever fell, making room for cleansing, healing.

Her tears came faster, harder, escalating toward sobs, and still that gentle, relentless gaze held her prisoner. She wasn't even aware of the fact that his erection had flagged somewhat, as she swayed helplessly in his grasp and wept as though her heart would break.

Rìona felt herself begin to let go. Her body twisted and writhed, her voice screamed, but her mind began to float, adrift, detached from the ordeal her physical self was enduring. Beneath her sobs and wails, her spirit surrendered, accepting what her body could not, and there was peace in that. Bliss.

So lost was she in the wild tumult of agony and euphoria that she failed to mark the moment Zevran cast the belt away. Alistair dragged her bodily up onto the bed and into his arms, cradling her like a child even though she whimpered in pain as her flaming backside settled into his lap. Zevran wrapped around her from the other side, and between them she wept piteously, releasing months of toxic anguish and hopelessness. Her fingers dug into the muscles off Alistair's back as she clung to him, and they both murmured reassurances to her, peppering her hair and skin with soft kisses and strokes of their hands.

"I'm sorry!" she mewled against his shoulder, soaking his skin with her tears. "Maker, I'm so sorry!"

She wept as though she would never stop, until her muscles ached with the force of her sobs. Just when she was certain she couldn't bear anymore, her tears began to ease, tapering slowly off into ragged hiccoughs and whimpers. Alistair's hands pushed her hair back from her damp face, carefully prising wet strands away from the skin where they clung. Zevran's hand ran soothingly down her shoulder and arm, down the length of her body where she was still curled into Alistair's lap, and slipped between her thighs.

She opened to the touch, letting her thighs part, aware of Alistair's shaft growing firm once more beneath her welted backside. Zevran's fingers toyed in her moisture, sliding oh, so very easily over her folds. Even now, with pain riding her nerves and the exultant catharsis of spent grief bringing hitching little whimpers to her lips, her body hummed with unsatisfied arousal. The gentle, careful touch of Zevran's fingertip to her nub was nearly agony in its own right, so exquisitely over-sensitized was she. And so he drew back to a less direct touch, pressing the pads of his fingers to the flesh just above her nub and rubbing in soft circles.

She let herself fall back, her weight supported by their arms behind her, her head dropping to rest against Zevran's shoulder. Almost immediately, soft shudders wracked her, gentle ripples of pulsating pleasure spreading through her lower belly. It didn't seem like a release so much as a precursor to something greater, however.

With a groan, Alistair spilled her from his lap, flipping so that he was above her as she tumbled onto her back onto the bed. Rìona cried out in renewed pain as her welted and abraded backside was chafed by the motion and the fabric of the coverlet. She wound up with her head nearly in Zevran's lap, her hair spilling over his groin and thighs, tangling around his rising shaft.

Alistair covered her body with his, sinking down onto her. Rìona whimpered in discomfort at the pressure on her backside, but she twined her arms around him, welcomed his weight upon her, parted her thighs to cradle his hips as he kissed her. The kiss was pure Alistair, all earnest tenderness and restrained aggression, starting as a gentle exploration and deepening into hunger. He rocked against her, his erection trapped between their bodies, sliding over her slick nub and crisp curls, and Rìona moaned into his mouth, shifting to to allow him to mold more snugly upon her.

Maker, it felt good. _He_ felt good, his bulk above her safe, not suffocating. Her hand reached out, groping, seeking, and Zevran took it, pressing a kiss to the fingertips before gripping it firmly. A moment later, his other hand claimed her other hand, and held it beside her head. Once again she was restrained, at their mercy.

Once again, Rìona felt herself sinking into them, surrendering her fear, her need for control. Alistair's hands thrust into her hair, engulfing the sides of her head, turning her this way and that into his kiss. Then they moved down her body. He lifted his weight off her, shifted his position just slightly, and guided himself into her.

"Oh, Maker, love..." Alistair moaned into her hair, completing his entry with a push of his hips. Rìona mewled, clutching at Zevran's hands, the intrusion an adjustment after so many months without. It ached, but it was a good ache, a welcome ache. She hitched her knees higher, hooked her ankles behind his thighs, and tilted her hips to welcome him inside.

He started out slowly, perhaps mindful of the abraded skin beneath her, or perhaps simply savoring the reunion. Rìona let herself be rocked by his easy thrusts, moaning softly, luxuriating in the sensation of simply being filled, complete. It didn't seem necessary to strive for more just yet.

She closed her eyes and let her head loll to the side a little, and let herself just _feel._

When she opened them again, there was Zevran above her, gazing down with something that might have been wonder, naked in his normally shuttered eyes. She became aware of his erection, so close to her head, still draped in her hair. She barely had time to consider what she might do to make him part of the pleasure, however, then he forestalled her, his hands tightening around hers when she began to pull away.

"No, _querida,_ not now. Perhaps later. Turn your gaze to our Alistair instead, and see how he needs you, how he adores you." Zevran sighed—actually sighed—and though his grip on her hands remained iron-clad, his thumbs caressed her hands. "You must not keep yourself from us again, _mi amor._ We are not whole without you."

Smiling tremulously, Rìona looked up at Alistair, who had paused in his thrusts and was indeed gazing down at her with adoration. He cracked his boyish grin in response to her smile, and suddenly Rìona was laughing and weeping at the same time, filled with unspeakable happiness and wonder. Alistair's laughter joined hers, and he sank down upon her again to press joyful kisses all over her face. A particularly powerful wave of laughter, however, and suddenly his humor fled, his hips driving him into her once more without volition.

Rìona gasped, arching, laughter dissipating. When she looked up again, Alistair's near-golden eyes were dark, intent.

"If you keep away so long again, I swear I'll whip you myself," he growled, drawing back and thrusting deeper, harder.

"Never!" she moaned, undulating beneath him, seeking a better angle. Alistair hooked his arms under her knees, folding her nearly in half, and drove into her again.

It was glorious, as Alistair released his restraint, his tenderness. He gave in to urgency, unleashing all of his passion upon her. The burning of her inflamed skin against the bedclothes was buried beneath the sensation of his cock slamming into her to the very hilt, driving breathless cries and incoherent babble from her lips. Deep within her belly, she felt the building of unbearable tension, the devastating event heralded by those gentle ripples Zevran had brought her to earlier. She strove toward it, her cries transforming into screams, and pleas, and eventually shrieks as the storm finally crashed upon her, leaving her thrashing helplessly beneath Alistair's weight and the restraint of Zevran's hands.

When she came back to herself, she lay between them once more, sheltered by them, her body aching, her inner thighs wet and sticky, her mind blissfully calm. Zevran brushed her sweat-damp hair back from her brow and kissed her tenderly, as Alistair pulled her closer to nestle more snugly against his body.

It was then that she realized this didn't feel like a new beginning at all.

It felt like coming home.

It wouldn't be easy, she knew, to emerge from the constant fear and sense of burden that had been crushing her for so long. But she owed it to them to try. Alistair had sacrificed everything he held sacred to buy them a slice of joy, a chance at a future. The least she could do was to try to live the life he had made for them.

Happiness, she was discovering, was not something that was fortuitously found, but something that was made, day by day, in a conscious effort to abandon sorrow and move toward the future.

For the first time, lying there surrounded by the two of them, she thought perhaps she could see the way.

THE END

_ELYSIUM: any place or state of perfect happiness; paradise._


End file.
